Then Jean resolved to ascertain for herself, beyond the possibility of doubt, whether Bob Meffin were a traitor or a true man. It was not a subject to ask questions about, nor was she the woman to lay bare her heart to the public gaze. But this coming sabbath was Jean’s sabbath out, and she could, without saying a word to anybody else, get her unsuspecting mistress to grant her leave to spend the day in walking across the moor and attending public worship at Logan Kirk instead of waiting on the ministrations of her master at Dalroy. Jean shed no tear nor did she sob and sigh audibly as she walked along to meet her destiny. But she was utterly unobservant of the nature she loved in the scene around her, either in its broad outlines or in its minute details. She had no attention to spare to-day for the spreading heathery moor, as fresh and free almost as the blue sky above it, on a sunny morning like this, when what had been the summer’s glistening dew-drops were just beginning to fall heavily and hoarily in the first suspicion of frost. Jean had no notice to give to the sweet pungent smell of the heather, to the varying hues of the purple milkwort, the yellow rock rose, the nodding white-flowered grass of Parnassus which diversified the red ling. She did not listen to the hum of the big bee--a splendid fellow in black and gold, who was continually crossing her path and sounding his drone in her ear, or to the twitter of the brown and grey linnet which brushed her very skirts as he rose from the broom, or to the crow of the moor cock and to the cry of the plover. Yet all these noises were made doubly distinct by the sabbath stillness which rendered itself felt even on the moor when no sportsmen were shooting there, no quarry men or bands of late shearers taking near cuts to their quarries and fields. Now and then Jean roused herself from her painful abstraction, and tried to control her racked heart and brain, by what she had always known as the potent spell of duty. It was the sabbath day, and therefore she was not her own mistress; though it was her ‘day out,’ she ought not, as a Christian woman, to be engrossed with her own worldly concerns, however imperative. She should try at least to engage in some mental exercise befitting the day--since, as Jean held, its divine obligation was not affected by her human distress. She made a great effort and prepared to repeat aloud, as she walked, one of the psalms with which her memory was stored, using it as the early Christians raised the symbol of the cross for a charm against distracting worldly thoughts. She began mechanically to say the first psalm, the earliest learnt by Scotch children, one of the most familiar throughout life. But All people that on earth do dwell, Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice,