Taken by surprise as she was, Jean cried out with shaken accents, in turn, ‘Bob Meffin!’ Then she recalled, as any true woman would have recalled, instantaneously, the whole circumstances, the scene, the spectators. Some of them had known the two in their green youth, and were doubtless speculating already, with keen interest and a sense of the ridiculous, how Jean Kinloch would meet Bob Meffin now that the pair had reached the years of discretion--after what had once been between them, after the falseness of Bob which had separated them. Jean was equal to the occasion; she stepped up to the cart, to which Bob sat nailed, with the intention of speaking to him, and doing her part in the interchange of such light questions and answers, as might be expected between old acquaintances who had known each other well in youth, and who happened to encounter each other in later years. As to any nearer relation which had ever existed between them, Jean’s attitude showed that she, at least, meant to behave as if she had forgotten it as utterly as the most trifling incident of her girlish days. But unfalteringly as Jean carried out this line of conduct, in the few paces that intervened between her and Bob Meffin, which she crossed steadily with every eye upon her, and with her own eyes not fixed on the ground, but raised to catch his, she took in at a glance the whole man--including every indication of the transformation he had undergone since the last time she had seen him. That Bob Meffin had been a gallant-looking young fellow in his degree, stalwart, lithe, fit to heave up the biggest sheaves on the stack which was in the process of building--as Jean had shorn foremost on her harvest rig--and to dance longest and with lightest foot at harvest home or bridal. This Bob Meffin was a broken-down, fast-ageing man, while Jean was still in her prime. His back was bent, while hers was straight; his hair had grown thin, and hung in uncared-for grey locks under his faded cap, while hers, in its undiminished profusion and without one dead white thread, was carefully disposed beneath her spotless white cap. His cheeks and forehead were weather-worn, dragged, and wrinkled, while hers remained fresh, round, and smooth. His working clothes had lost all the smartness with which the Bob Meffin of old had worn his most patched jacket and most clay-clogged shoon. Before that lightning-flash of womanly observation, they gave evidence of such untidiness and neglect in absent buttons, ragged cuffs, and the frayed, dangling ends of his neckerchief, as not only cast the utmost discredit on the wife who had supplanted Jean, but told in graphic language that Bob had lost all personal pride and even proper sense of what was due in the dress of a respectable ploughman, who had risen to be foreman over the younger men on the farm.