That was the letter, considered in language, crafty in purpose, really, an overture for the hand of Marget Forbes, and I sat far into the night, while my peat fire died out in Corgarff Castle, wondering how I was to answer it, and, even more, how I myself stood towards the acute personal situation which it created. For I saw that the Black Colonel meant to make love and do business at the same stroke, not for the first time, perhaps, in his life of emprise; and certainly here was no new thing in the world's queer story. _V.--A Cairn of Remembrance_ It is a good way, when you are in doubt, to wait and let events shape a decision, and this was how I came to regard the Black Colonel's letter. He had set me a pretty puzzle in his written words, because, contrasted with the light touch-and-go of spoken words, these always seem to have something fateful in them, as of a king's signature to a decree. Moreover, I was vaguely conscious of being the guardian of a woman's instinct for safety, an instinct which arrives with the cradle and only goes with the grave, and that made me feel somewhat helpless; a man in depths he cannot fathom, for such is the uncharted sea of womanhood. Marget Forbes and her mother lived in the Dower House, thrown to them, as a piece of bread might be tossed from a rich man's table, when Corgarff was declared forfeit and the castle occupied by soldiery. Her men-folk had been out with Charlie and had not come back from Culloden, as the Cairn of Remembrance on the hills might have told any seeker for them. Each clansman, as he departed, had put a stone to it, and none had returned to lift that stone again, so it became a tombstone. They were dead for ever to Corgarff and to the lands which had been the property of their forbears, almost since time was in those blood-heathered Highlands. Families rose and fell, for family reasons, or as the clans to which they belonged prospered or had adversity. Thus vital changes in a corner of the Scottish Highlands, like this of ours, were more frequent than the historians, men apt to assess on surface generalities and neglectful of the hidden human wells, usually make out. But, as the changes took place within what I may call the ring-fence of the clan system, they really only mattered to those who were directly concerned. Corgarff Castle, however, had been held by the same Forbes family in direct, unbroken line, partly because its successive chiefs had strong right arms, partly because the domain had little to make anybody else covetous. The Sabine women whom the old Romans took, would have been the beautiful ones, and it is the same with the face of Mother Earth. What appears best is taken first!