It goes without saying that Peggy had no heart for that unsuitable, inopportune merry-making when her laird was far away and her mother’s grave had not grown green. Bitter self-reproach for what she had been powerless to prevent, with aversion to the ill-timed gaiety and dismay of what might come of it, wrung her gentle spirit. Notwithstanding, Peggy was swept on with the current and compelled to take a part in the fun which grew fast and furious, and was maintained far into the small hours, while Baldie Fuggie betrayed that his small amount of polish was but skin-deep. Peggy escaped at last from what had become a homely edition of the situation of the lady in the Masque of ‘Comus,’ crying, ‘Oh, mind, I’m a marriet woman, I’m the laird’s Leddy,’ to shut herself up in her room, sink scared and remorseful on the first seat, stare with tightly-clasped hands at one of Drumsheugh’s three-cornered hats which she had kept fondly hanging on the most available peg behind the door, and finally begin to sob and cry her heart out. Cunnings had been removed in a state of insensibility from her presidence over the festivities, and Jenny was leading a troop of skirling women racing over the house, pursued with loud shouts by Baldie Fuggie and his fellows, who did not pretend to Baldie’s scraping of veneer, bent on extorting forfeits of kisses and inflicting the penalty of rubbing rough beards on blowsy cheeks. The report of Peggy’s party--it was never called Jenny’s, not to say Cunnings’s--spread far and wide, and created as lively a sensation in select circles as if it had been the inauguration of a county Almacks. In the days and places where hardly anybody read a line of anything, save of the newspaper on one day a week and of the Bible on the Sabbath, local gossip counted for a great deal. Without it conversation would have languished, and men and women’s minds become stagnant. Every scrap of gossip was therefore carefully collected and made much of. Peggy’s party was reckoned very racy and droll gossip, essentially characteristic and not without its moral. It proved a great boon and set off half a dozen teas and three dinner-parties among the neighbours. Fine doings at Drumsheugh, but no more than what was to be expected. See what came of low marriages. Time the laird were home, whether to reap the fruits of his folly, or to stave off a worse catastrophe, if that were possible. Poor old Mrs. Ramsay, who had held her head high, and had hardly reckoned a young lady in the country-side a fit match for her son. But pride comes before a fall. It was at this time that the mocking title of ‘Lady Peggy’ was first bestowed on the interloper, the heroine of all these good stories. For Jenny Hedderwick and Cunnings were beneath these worthy people’s notice, and little mention was made of either delinquent in the arraignment of their victim.