’What dirty gossip o’ the gutters ha’ ye got about the man?’ said Mrs. Graham, with rising anger and a flashing eye, ’out with your scandal, if ye must!’ ’Oh, scandal, lud, ma’am, no!’ said Nancy. ’Scandal and poor Jimmy Cheape were never named together, only—’ ’Only _what_,’ cried the irate lady of The Mains, with a stamp of her big foot. ’Well, ma’am,’ said Nancy, coyly, ’I’d sooner bite my tongue out, sure, than that it should meddle with Miss Alison’s good fortune. Only, since you ask me, it does surprise me that so distinguished a family as Graham of The Mains shouldn’t look higher for their eldest daughter than poor Jimmy Cheape.’ ’A distinguished family,’ said Mrs. Graham, with a mincing mimicry of her guest’s tone, ’a distinguished family wi’ seven daughters has to take what it can get. It can ill afford genteel ideas like yours, Nancy,’ with somewhat withering significance. ’But what’s wrong wi’ Mr. Cheape, to _your_ fine notions, may I ask?’ ’Well, ma’am, since you _will_ have it,’ said Nancy, with an air of reluctant candour, ’simply that he’s the leavings of so many other folk,—that’s all.’ ’Oh, is he, indeed?’ said Mrs. Graham, with fine sarcasm. ’’Tis so old a tale, indeed,’ pursued Nancy, pictorially, ’that it stretches back clean and away beyond my poor memory. But even to my knowledge, Jimmy Cheape has been the rejected of ladies more than I can count, and such as are not worthy to tie the shoes of Miss Alison.’ ’Oh, ay!’ commented Mrs. Graham, with a vicious eye upon her informant. ’Well?’ ’There was Jenny M’Lure,’ continued Nancy, with a reminiscent air. ’All of one winter he was after her, not that _she_ would look at him though, and the whole town laughing and looking on. And then there was Molly Baleny—_she_ might have had him, for she was near forty and no beauty, but she put him to the door too. And there was Jean M’Gregor, the cutler’s daughter, you know, in Nicol Street; a fine dance she led him, the hussy—for, after all, a laird was a bit of a string to her bow. But, of course, she gave him the go-by in the end, and, in my opinion, she was heartless in the way she held up an old man like that to be the jest of the town: ’twas no womanly behaviour. And there were others, I assure you; he’s been on his knees to some girl or another in the public park, ’twas the season’s great joke, but I forget her name. ’Tis not that he’s wicked or a man of ill-conduct in any way, ma’am—but he is so comical, and no woman will marry a man that is a laughing-stock.’