Primrose Ramsay improved her visit in other ways. She and Mrs. Forsyth occupied and amused themselves after the most approved standards of their class and generation. Mrs. Forsyth had put herself slightly out of the upper circles by marrying a country-town doctor. Still the simple, stay-at-home gentry were not over-particular, else they must have narrowed their set to a nearly stifling extent; and there was a nice enough lower stratum of professional men, bankers, clergy and half-pay officers with their families in Craigie, to which the Forsyths could justly consider themselves as belonging, that at many points touched upon and merged into the lairds and their ladies’ sphere. Young Mrs. Forsyth had committed no heinous solecism in marrying her doctor, and she was not punished for the small offence. She did not feel ashamed to invite Primrose Ramsay to become the Forsyths’ first guest in fulfilment of an old school-girl promise. Primrose could accept the invitation and be happy in the visit, without any further _arrière-pensée_ than belonged to her stifled regret that she was thenceforth banished from Drumsheugh, which had become a prohibited place to her. Mrs. Forsyth had acted differently from Jamie Ramsay, and the result was much more satisfactory. The single light in which the two affairs might be said to act and react on each other was that though the laird was Dr. Forsyth’s patient, as Jenny Hedderwick had remarked, none looked on the unfortunate match with more disfavour, or inveighed against Peggy’s delinquencies with greater contempt, than did Mrs. Forsyth. It was as if she felt bound to exonerate herself from the most distant suspicion of such gross imprudence by exaggerating the public sentiment where Drumsheugh and ‘Lady Peggy’ were concerned.