The country people--most of them farmers and farm-servants with the village hand-loom weavers--tramped and tumbled in, with the want of ceremony which used to distinguish a Scotch rural congregation. The minister and precentor took their places, and Jean fixed mute imploring eyes on the latter as if the decision of her fate rested with him. He was a homely, elderly man, distinguished among his compeers by the _sobriquet_, derived from his office in the kirk, of ‘Singing Johnny,’ a souter by trade, but a less thirsty and a more theological souter than his great namesake. As he rose for the secular rite which in Scotland precedes the religious services, even the most austerely devout listened attentively with human interest. And if the congregation had only known, so as to watch a young woman in the obscurity of the back seats, they might have been aroused by the fading of the rich colour in her face, the rigid set of her mouth, and the desperate light as of a creature at bay, in what ought to have been her reasonable grey eyes, to comprehend that her hands were clasped tight--even clenched--under the shelter of the book-board in an agony. Johnny dallied with the matter in hand, perfectly unaware of the torture he was inflicting. He laboured under no press of business as at Martinmas or Whitsunday; this was a sabbath between terms when little was doing in Johnny’s line. He was able to rise in a deliberate manner, to sleek down his stubbly hair as he was wont to do, before raising the psalm tune, to look around him with even more philosophical indifference; indeed, the only customary act which he refrained from doing as if to distinguish his secular from his religious duties, was that of putting up his hands before his mouth and giving a preliminary cough behind the screen. At last he proclaimed sonorously: ‘There is a purpose of marriage between Tammas Proodfit and Ailison Clinkscales--for the second time,’ not that the purpose had been entertained, dropped and resumed, but that the announcement had been made before and would ring out once again in the ears of the listening kirk. One woman was listening intently with bent head as if she would fain catch even the sound of a pin’s fall, through the thick tumultuous beating of her heart. At the words spoken there was the faintest rustle of relaxation in her attitude. The couple whose intention had been thus sounded abroad were entire strangers to her. What had she to do with a Tammas Proodfit and an Ailison Clinkscales, or what had they to do with her? It was not to hear them ‘cried’ that she had walked ten miles across the moor. After the proclamation there was a distinct pause, which had the air of being instituted for sensational effect, unless Johnny had no more ‘purposes of marriages’ in the background to fire off at the congregation.