Peggy’s hands were far more unmanageable than her head or her heels. She had been brought up too entirely in the country, and Luckie Hedderwick had been too poor for the child to have derived any advantage from such a ‘sewing school’ as Craigie possessed, under the patronage of some of the Ladies Bountiful in the neighbourhood. It need hardly be said in addition that Peggy had not the smallest acquaintance with the mysteries of high cooking, preserve and pastry making, and the brewing of home-made wine. Peggy could spin and knit well, and do a little coarse sewing and darning rather indifferently. She could scour a floor or a table, make porridge and kail, boil potatoes and bake cakes, but she could do little else in the light of domestic attainments. Unfortunately, with the exception of the spinning and knitting, even Peggy’s few acquirements were out of count. The field for them was gone. Primrose set herself with affectionate zeal to supply the blank, but long before Peggy had toiled half through her first sampler, Miss Ramsay was forced to own to herself that here was labour thrown away, as much as if she had sought to train Peggy to play on the spinnet late in the day. There are some respects in which lost opportunities--however innocently and inevitably lost--can never be recalled. Peggy’s fingers had grown stiff, and her eyes dull to nice distinctions of pattern and colour. She must be left to her spinning which, fortunately, was not yet banished from drawing-rooms; and she must be permitted to hem towels and dusters in the same dignified quarter. For the child-wife Dora could not have felt prouder to be of use than was the rustic ‘Lady Peggy.’ Indeed, Peggy went further than Dora, since the little English girl could feel content to be played with--whether by David Copperfield or Gyp, while it made the deeper-souled Scotch girl, who had once actually been the bread-winner of a household, feel humbled and miserable to realise herself of no real moment, an idle ornament--if she could be called an ornament--and not one of the stays of her house. At last Peggy’s wifely ambition was fired to gigantic struggles by two grand and glorious achievements which were dangled before her eyes. If she would give her whole attention and try and try again, she might--who knows?--so improve in white seam and cookery as to be fit before she died, or her sight and memory failed, to make a frilled shirt for Drumsheugh, and bake a pie which he could eat. How hard Peggy strove at her tasks, with such splendid rewards before her, during the long summer days! So immeasurable was her enthusiasm that against tremendous odds she attained her object, even before Drumsheugh’s return. She made the shirt, every bit with her own slow hands: Seam, gusset, and band; Band, gusset, and seam;