Primrose looked in the manly, honest face, and believed every word he said, to the last syllable. Her dauntless spirit rose and her generous heart swelled. ‘There is a better resource,’ she said, with hearty sympathy and goodwill, relinquishing her opposition all at once, and, womanlike, passing in a bound to warm partisanship. ‘She shall not be set upon like that! How base of her kindred! But we will circumvent them, sir. You and I will beat them before the game is played out. I’m not afraid that my cousin Jamie will be seriously angered by my interference. I’ll venture to take him in my own hand. As for my aunt, she’s an upright woman, Mr. Home. She would never countenance such wrong-doing. She is ignorant of it. When she welcomed Bonnie Peggy home she meant to receive her as a daughter and behave to her as a mother should--I am sure of it.’ It was a difficult enough task which Balcairnie had set Primrose Ramsay, and he could render her no assistance in the beginning. It must not even appear that she was acting on his prompting. Mrs. Forsyth was exceedingly aggrieved by Primrose’s proposing to pay a visit to Peggy, and opposed the step violently. Doctor Forsyth, who should have known better, shook his head at his wife’s instigation. Primrose’s happy first visit to the couple was in danger of having its harmony entirely spoilt, and the girl suspected that her friends’ opinion was a tolerably sure sign of the light in which the world generally would regard her conduct. It was mean, time-serving, and unworthy of her to go near ‘Lady Peggy,’ and seek to get the foolish mistress of Drumsheugh out of the mess into which she had floundered. But Primrose was as strong and staunch in facing and overcoming difficulties in what she recognised to be a good cause as Peggy was weak and yielding. There was the courage of a lion in the small, pale, pleasant-mannered, merry-tongued girl. Primrose walked out alone to Drumsheugh, claimed the right of entrance to the drawing-room, which could not well be denied to her, and begged young Mrs. Ramsay to be told that her cousin, Miss Ramsay, had come to wait upon her. Peggy did not pause, like ‘Mistress Jean’ in the ‘Laird o’ Cockpen,’ to ask petulantly what brought her visitor there ‘at sic a like time,’ for it was early in the day. She was overwhelmed with consternation and shame while Jenny coolly informed her cousin that here was one of the laird’s family come to call his wife to account, to require a statement of her stewardship, and to pounce on all her shortcomings. ‘Oh! what sall I do, Jenny? Mercy on me! what sall I do?’ besought the poor changeling in the foreign nest. ‘Say you’re no weel--I’m sure that’s true eneuch,’ suggested the temptress. ‘Say you never trysted her here, and you maun bid her excuse you for you’re no fit to receive a visitor, you’ve gotten the heartburn, or the headache, or ony other convenient ailment.’