It had been dusk outside when Sir Hugh had approached me. The dim light of the candles in the big parlour in which we supped was not more favourable to a disclosure of my secret than the twilight outside. I felt confident that no suspicions had been awakened in the soldier's mind, although how I could have borne his keen scrutiny in the full blaze of day was a doubtful question. I did not mean to bear it, so far as I was concerned, under those conditions if it could in any wise be helped. "If I be not indiscreet, Sir Hugh," said I, during a pause in the meal, "I take it that you are an unmarried man?" "You take it right, Master Carthew. A soldier loves all ladies; he marries none." "A poor lookout for womankind if the best men are in the army," said I, bridling. "'Tis the stern necessity of the trade," he returned coolly. "Wedlock and the sword go not well together. Have you a sweetheart, young sir?" he asked in his turn. "I?" I exclaimed indignantly. "Certainly not. No. Yes.... That is..." "Keep thy secret, lad. Do you come soldiering with me, you will have one in every town where you are stationed longer than a fortnight." "Are soldiers, then, so fickle?" "They are truth itself," he paused, "to the nearest fair," he added. He lifted his glass and surveyed it a moment with half-shut eyes. "I give you a toast. To the nearest fair!" He drank his. I sipped mine. He noticed my abstemiousness. "When you love harder, you drink deeper and fight better," he said sagely. "Doubtless," said I. "And yet," I ran on, "the romances tell us of the constant devotion of the knight to his lady. Of how the soldier adventures far and wide and yet remains true to his one ideal at home." "Such hath not been my experience. War and soldiering you will find are not as they are writ of in books." "You have questioned me; I have no doubt that you will permit me to question you," I said in my turn. "You are not under my command yet," said the captain, smiling at my presumption. "Ask what you will." "Then there is no especial lady to whom your thoughts revert?" "None, or rather there are a dozen," was the prompt reply. I do not know why I should have felt glad at this, or what particular interest I had in Sir Hugh Richmond's love affairs, but he had rather flouted the idea of my sex, and, although I wore the trews for the time being, I could not forget that I was yet a woman. I should have liked to teach this red-coated Sassenach a thing or two, and I really longed for an opportunity to show him that we girls of Scotland were not to be so lightly dismissed as all that.