Here were the wrong doer and the wrong sufferer. A fine moral could have been pointed from the difference between them, even though a hair-splitting casuist might have urged that it was not a case of retribution alone, since the constant exposure and the coarse fare of a ploughman, even when he carries the clearest of consciences within his bosom, is apt to tell upon him betimes, and make him look elderly before he is forty. As for Jean, though she had undergone ‘a disappointment,’ having continued in domestic service, she had of necessity missed such parallel drudgery and lack of sufficiently nourishing food, as she had once looked forward to willingly and cheerfully. But such causes make the ploughman’s wife keep pace with her husband in ageing prematurely. Still Bob Meffin had altered with a vengeance; and Jean could hardly believe the testimony of her eyes and was impressed by the change. For surely nobody will say that because Adam delved and Eve span, because Jean had been a servant lass and Bob a ploughman all their respective lives, they had not the feelings of their kind, so that Jean should fail to have a sensitive perception that her former hero had lost, in the rough battle of life, all the glamour with which he had once been surrounded? Was Jean pleased that it should be so? That she had lived to see how Bob Meffin had been punished for his desertion of her and degradation of another? She could not tell, there was such a tumult of pride and pain in her heart. But she went up to him where he sat and said with the easiest manner imaginable, ‘Is this you, Bob? How are you, and how are your wife and bairns?’ ‘My wife!’ cried Bob aghast. ‘Do you no ken, Jean, she’s dead and gane a year and a half syne?’ Jean received another shock in which there were appalling elements. The dead woman had been one against whom Jean--Christian woman as she was--had borne a sore grudge for many a day. Nay, only a moment ago, Jean had been sharply summing up, with rising disdain and not without a sense of bitter satisfaction, what she had reckoned as so many unanswerable proofs of Leezbeth Red’s wifely incompetency, while all the time Jean’s successful rival had passed away long months ago without Jean’s knowledge, to give in her--Leezbeth’s--account to the Great Judge. ‘Poor woman!’ said Jean more softly; ‘she had gotten her ca’ early.’ ‘She was never a strong woman,’ said Bob, speaking without the awkwardness which must have accompanied the discussion of his living wife’s qualities with Jean. He spoke also with that little hush of reverence, which is found in every man or woman with a spark of generosity and awe in the soul, when he or she refers to the dead--once so near, but who has gone far beyond all kindly communion and familiar every-day life.