Mrs. Forsyth, though she had set the example, did not clearly perceive the parallel, and was by no means without several strong private objections. Balcairnie might have plenty of money and old wheat stacks, but he was not in a learned profession like Dr. Forsyth, and it would be a terrible upheaval of the very foundations of gentility if unequal marriages were to become common, the rule instead of the exception. But there was great and unmixed joy in the hearts of Drumsheugh and Peggy over the delightful fortuitousness of the attachment. Drumsheugh almost shook the bridegroom elect’s hand off, and loudly claimed the right to be ‘blackfoot’ in turn to his friend. Peggy hugged Primrose as if they had been very sisters, and cried that now she was not to lose her, she, Peggy, had little more to desire; she was near the summit of human bliss. In the end even the few hostile voices were silenced, for Balcairnie, in the course of a year or two, fulfilled his purpose of buying a fair estate, was welcomed among the lairds, and held up his head modestly among them. Then the old Lady of Drumsheugh and Mrs. Forsyth took him fully to their hearts. JEAN KINLOCH. CHAPTER I. JEAN SCORNED. ‘Ower the muir among the heather,’ Jean Kinloch walked straight and fast on a sunny sabbath morning in autumn. She was only nineteen years of age but already she was tall and broad-shouldered, with the perfect proportions and perfect development of health and strength. She was nearer to a beautiful woman than to a bonnie lassie. She had the dark-haired, black-browed, grey-eyed face, with the clear-cut features and clear complexion which one is accustomed to associate with the highest type of Norman beauty. But Jean’s white square teeth, and round somewhat massive chin, were departures from the type as it is usually to be met with. And if she had the dignity and earnestness which on occasions break into sunshine--incomparably sweeter, more pathetic, even more radiant, relieved against the almost sombre background, than an all-pervading, soulless light-heartedness can be--it was not Norman dignity and earnestness. It was the self-respect and sedateness of the Scotch peasant woman, on whom a Hebrew stamp has been deeply impressed, who is enamoured of duty as other women are enamoured of pleasure, to whom the sternest doctrines of Calvinism are invested with an awful beauty. These are the Lord’s decrees, and though He should slay her, yet will she trust in Him.