These reasons given to a woman of Lady Stair’s type were scarcely likely to be listened to with much patience, and Janet Dalrymple and Lord Rutherfurd soon saw that all their love-making must be done under the rose, and that they must wait as best they could for the obdurate parents to change their minds.  Together they broke a gold coin, of which each wore a half, and solemnly called upon God to witness them plighting their troth, and together imprecated dreadful evils upon the one who should prove faithless.  Doubtless Lady Stair was too clever a woman not to have a shrewd suspicion that her daughter’s attachment to Lord Rutherfurd was something more than a mere piece of girlish sentiment; but if she did know, the knowledge did not overburden her.  Obviously another suitor must be provided without loss of time.  The expulsive power of a new affection must promptly be tried on the love-sick girl, whose pale face was in itself enough to betray the condition of her heart.

To Lord Stair belonged the credit of finding one who was approved of by Lady Stair as an entirely suitable match.  David Dunbar, younger, of Baldoon in Wigtonshire, a solid young man with a good, solid fortune, was the son-in-law of their choice; and Lady Stair found no difficulty in getting him to see that her beautiful daughter was undoubtedly the right wife for him.

Contemporary history furnishes us with no description of Andrew, Lord Rutherfurd, but we learn from the Edinburgh printer who furnished the Dunbar family with an enthusiastic elegy on the death of David Dunbar of Baldoon that apparently he was a little red-faced man, ardently keen about agricultural pursuits, and deeply interested in the breeding of cattle and horses.  Moreover, he was a student, well versed in modern history and in architecture, and with a good head for arithmetic (did he add up the figures of the fortune of Janet Dalrymple entirely to his own satisfaction?), and he had the additional amazing distinction chronicled by his eulogising biographer—­

     “He learned the French, be’t spoken to his praise,
     In very little more than forty days.”

It is impossible to tell how much of the love story of the girl whom he proposed to make his wife was known to young Baldoon.  Possibly he had had it lightly sketched to him by Lady Stair’s skilled hand, as a mere girlish fancy, likely to be very soon past and already entirely on the wane.  In any case, Baldoon evidently saw no more difficulties in the way of his nuptials than did Lord and Lady Stair.  The fact that the bride “canna thole the man” must ever be a purely secondary consideration in such matrimonial arrangements.  Meantime the unhappy bride-elect had the scheme laid before her, and in spite of her sobbing protests, was commanded to conform to the wishes of her parents.