But young Jean was not journeying on so unexceptionable and profitable an errand. It was her own private affairs which sent her forth to cross the broad moor on the sabbath morning, and any competent judge might easily guess that Jean’s affairs were in dire confusion when she took such a step. Jean’s story was not unprecedented in her rank of life, though it is to be hoped that hers was an extreme case. She had been courted for years, young as she was, and at last trothplighted to a young ploughman. Their marriage had been fixed to take place in the following spring at Whitsunday, one of the two great feeing, flitting, and marrying terms among Scotch agricultural labourers. Jean had been making manifold happy preparations in her quiet womanly way by little purchases from pedlars, by seams sewed diligently in the half hours which were honestly hers, by plans made over and over again with fond deliberation and reiteration for the laying out of her little savings and her next half year’s wages. She had been undecided whether she herself should invest in a chest of drawers, or help Bob to buy an eight-day clock, either of which would be an ‘honesty,’ that is a standing mark of respectability in their ‘cot house’ and might descend as an heirloom to their children. In the meantime the bridegroom elect had left Dalroy, which was his native parish as well as Jean’s, and gone ‘to better himself’ on a farm in the parish of Logan. But it did not seem to her to matter much--except where their feelings were concerned, that he should have little communication with her, either personally or by letter in the interval. He might or he might not, after the pitting of the potatoes, the last pressing job of the rural year, tak his stick into his hand on his sabbath-day out, and cross ten miles of moor, as Jean was doing now, to visit her for a few hours. He might or he might not send her a formal letter or two, or a message occasionally by the carrier. What was his performance or failure in such trifles to Jean’s great trust in her lad? Yet of all classes of men, perhaps with the single exception of soldiers, not one is so notoriously fickle in love-making as Scotch ploughmen, not one is more exposed to special sources of temptation, and not one, alas! as Jean knew, though her pure mind recoiled from the grievous knowledge and refused absolutely to connect it with her lover, is more apt to fall into a particular form of vice. But it is to be hoped that the class’s frequent fickleness and folly do not often attain the climax they reached here; for Jean had not only been courted, a solemn promise of marriage had been exchanged between her and her lover, and such promises are not broken--either by lord or lout, lady or lass, without causing such a scandal in their respective worlds, as proves the comparative rarity of the offence.