Jean was so confounded at the turn matters had taken, and the advantage Bob Meffin was seeking to wrest from her pity, and the softening of her heart towards him and his, that she hardly gave their full meaning to the first words of this second suit, and it was not for a moment that the extent of their presumption struck her. ‘The deil’s in the man!’ Jean said under her breath, in spite of her principles, her decorum, and the recollection that she had served in a minister’s family for a large part of her life. Was there no end to the conceit of men, in themselves and their bairns? And so he thought he could make her amends! Doubtless he imagined she was still hankering after his fickle love, and pining for his sake, while she being an honest woman had banished him from her thoughts, as a married man, fourteen years before. By his careless use of the slighting term ‘wanter,’ which complaisant contemptuous married couples applied to single men but particularly to single women, he betrayed that he shared in the coarse popular scorn of old maids, and the mean opinion that they would be only too glad to snatch at any--the most wretched, chance of changing their condition and escaping from its reproach. He, the middle-aged, battered, and broken-down ploughman with his two forward hempies of lasses, and his heavy handful of a sick bairn, concluding impudently that any husband was better than none, judged himself a fit match for an independent well-esteemed woman like Jean Kinloch! And he had been the very man, the leear, as he had rightly called himself, to the one woman, the worst enemy to the other, of the two who had trusted him. He had wrung Jean’s heart when it was young and tender, and lichtlied her for a lass like Leezbeth Red, leaving Jean to be the mark for the jests and scoffs of mocking tongues. Jean was burning with indignation, and looking at it in her light, greater provocation could not have been given her. ‘Are you daft, Bob Meffin?’ She turned upon him with a pale face set like iron, and words which cut like swords. ‘Do you think I would have a gift of you, after what has come and gane? If I had been brodent on a man, I might have had my wale of a hantle better than you ever were, without waiting so long. Man, I’m weel content to be an auld maid, it’s no sic a forlorn lot as you marriet folk in your crouseness fancy. But I would be keen to get marriet gin I could consent to stand in a dead woman’s shoon, a lass who was like to have had “a misfortune”’--Jean used the apologetic phrase with strong contempt--‘who had so little truth and honesty in her that she could steal the fickle man’s heart and word which were not worth the taking, though they had been flung at her feet, kennin’ a’ the time they belonged to another woman--would I be plaguet wi’ her brats o’ bairns, think ye?’