One fainting heart leapt up with half wild relief and joy. After all it was a base report without a word of truth in it. Bob was to be proved innocent as the babe unborn. Woe’s me! Johnny was even then fumbling with another set of lines in his horny fingers; he lifted up his voice afresh and called all present to witness that there was also a purpose of marriage ‘between Robert Meffin and Leezbeth Red for the first time.’ Having discharged his lay functions, he stopped abruptly to look up, in expectation of the folded paper which the minister rose and bent over the pulpit to hand to him, taking Singing Johnny into his confidence as it were, with regard to the psalms and paraphrases appropriate to the sermon, which were to be sung during the service, for which the precentor was to find the fitting tunes on the spur of the moment. Even after the commencement of the second proclamation, the formal employment of the full christian name struck so unfamiliarly on Jean’s ears, as to stay the flood of anguish for an instant longer, till the enunciation of the surname in company with the name she had heard given to her rival, rendered doubt no longer possible. It was all over, as Jean had heard said after her father and mother had drawn their last breath. It was too true: this was her Bob Meffin and no other whom she had heard cried with another woman in order to repair as far as might be a shameful wrong. Jean felt like the rest of us when the catastrophe we have most dreaded has come upon us, that she had not known how much she had hoped against hope--how hard a battle hope had fought for bare life, till it lay slain stark and cold at her feet. For she had not come there with any intention of protesting against the marriage which would be celebrated within the next few weeks. Such a step is even rarer in Scotland than in England; neither could there be any appeal under the circumstances. It was only that Bob Meffin had lied to her and before the Lord, had fallen from what Jean had judged to be the glory of his manhood and dragged down another with him in his fall. Thenceforth the two who had been all in all could be less than nothing to each other. Jean had listened to the sentence which blighted her youthful hopes, crushed her tenderest affections, and left her in the flower of her beauty, in all her sense and goodness, for no fault of her own, a lass ‘lichtlied’--scorned before the world--that sorest humiliation to a woman. And it was all for the wiles of another lass with regard to whom Jean knew full well, without any vanity or arrogance on her part, that Leezbeth Red and such as she were not worthy to be named in the same breath with her--Jean, since they could not save either themselves or the men whom they had never loved with a noble unselfish love, from gross sin and degradation.