Jean was not accustomed to railways as her travelled friend was, so it did not occur to her to lessen the fatigue of the expedition by having recourse to the station, nearly three miles off, and being carried by the iron horse and deposited a mile from her destination. To Jean, by far the simpler and less troublesome course was to ‘take her foot in her hand’ and walk the ten miles to Logan. It was already the month of February, and the days were lengthening, though spring was making little show in the woods and fields, and least of all on the moor. Jean accomplished this journey as she had accomplished that other, with the frost-bitten instead of the blooming heather under her feet, and the former summer sky still grey with wintry clouds over her head. It was not the sabbath day, so Jean was not called upon to redeem the holy time by speaking to herself in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, as she trod the long and hard road; but she caught herself muttering involuntarily half aloud more than once, ‘God be gude to Bob Meffin and his mitherless bairns.’ And she was conscious, through her anxiety, that peace with God and man, instead of restless misery, filled her breast. Jean passed the kirk where she had sat and heard Bob ‘cried’ with another woman, as it seemed to her an age ago--passed the kirkyard where Leezbeth Red lay sleeping. She knew the road to Blawart Brae perfectly well. Had she not learnt its every turning by heart in the days when she had thought of the farm in the light of her home as a young wife? Bob’s present house was not, indeed, the house which that young wife would have dwelt in, the last was tenanted by one of the junior ploughmen and his wife--no older than Jean would have been if she had come to Blawart Brae a married woman by the time she was twenty. Jean caught a glimpse of a young lass whose brown hand was already invested with the dignity of a wedding-ring, as she looked up and paused in the act of pulling up a curly green kail-stock from her ‘yaird.’ Jean stared wistfully at the fresh contented face as at a picture of what her own face might have been like, if Bob Meffin had not broken his vows more than a dozen of years before. Bob’s cottage was that of the foreman on the farm, but the little advantages which the promotion secured had all been lost in the grinding poverty to which he had been subjected. Bob himself opened the door to Jean’s knock, for he was able to walk about the house, though his arm was still in an early precarious stage of recovery. ‘Eh! Jean, is this you? Come in by; it’s kind of you to look in and speer for me in the by-going, since you maun ha’e some other errand at Logan.’ He cried with such glad surprise, that Jean had no more cause to fear the nature of her welcome.