This invitation was with the sole purpose of the two fair traffickers in feathers getting round the simple farmer and inducing him to have every ‘pen’ which fell from the guinea-fowls carefully picked up and stored on the ladies’ behalf--if the greed did not prompt them to lead or drive their victim to the barbarous extremity of slaying the birds that they might then be plucked for the benefit of the tippet manufacturers. The still greater wantonness of torture by which birds have been plucked alive to serve the vanity of women had not so much as entered the heads of a more primitive generation. Mrs. Forsyth’s single scruple was on the score of comparative gentility. ‘Jock Home is only the farmer of Balcairnie,’ she said anxiously to her husband; and ‘though Drumsheugh has thought fit to run and ride the country with him, they were two young men after their own pursuits. I do not know, Davie, if it is right for us to have him at our table otherwise than as your patient, to bid him to meet Primrose Ramsay as though he were young Pittentullo’, or Captain Don, or any other gentleman of our set.’ ‘Hout, Kirsty,’ said the more liberal doctor, ‘you have not stuck so fast to your set. Balcairnie is a fine enough fellow who would pass muster anywhere. He is well to do; I should not wonder though he were to buy his farm, if Drumsheugh let it get into the market, and come out as a laird among the best of them some day.’ So Mrs. Forsyth swallowed her misgivings and Balcairnie furnished a stalwart figure to the two o’clock dinner-table in the flat above the apothecary’s shop, which also belonged to Dr. Forsyth, and was a source of considerable profit to him. Such a house was thought then quite good enough for the best doctor in Craigie, even though he had mated with a sprig of the gentry. Their olfactory nerves were not supposed sufficiently sensitive to feel mortally offended by the occasionally pungent smell of those drugs which helped to butter the couple’s bread. Balcairnie and Primrose regarded each other in side glances, under their eyelashes, with some interest. He had heard in the inveterate distortion of facts which is a prominent feature in gossip, that the Lady had intended her niece for her son. Primrose had just been told that Balcairnie had contrived to shift his folly and its consequences to Drumsheugh’s broad shoulders, though her mother-wit had cancelled the error, and laid hold of the greater probability of the yeoman’s having been jilted for the laird. The estimate which the two formed of each other at first sight differed comically and unfairly. ‘A shilpet sparroy of a lass like that!’ Balcairnie reflected disdainfully, ‘was she to stand in Bonnie Peggy’s licht? Drumsheugh would not have had an ee in his head or a mind of his ain, if he had preferred this leddy to yon kimmer.’