"Oh," answered I, "there are still things to do, things, some of them, which I don't like, as my military superiors down there in Aberdeen town may be suspecting, for only last week, you know, they sent up a troop of horse to make a special search of Corgarff for any hidden Jacobite powder and shot. What happened you also know. Our friends of your Stuart faith heard of this expedition long before it arrived, filled their knapsacks with bannocks, and went to the hills. The troopers came, found, by persistent search in deserted homes, a few barrels of Spanish powder, some hundreds of bullets and a broken cannon, and threw them all into the Water of Don. It was not very exciting, especially to me, because it was a kind of censure; but nothing worse happened than the breaking of a drunken trooper's neck, by a fall from his horse. Here was one more way of death, not a pretty way, for the man's commanding officer said jocosely, 'The idiot, he must have come upon bad drink in his searches, and a bad woman is less dangerous.'" "Your statement," said Marget, "is, I see, a confidential apology to me for the ongoings of those set over us and you! I hope you don't spend too many hours in reflections as unprofitable as the subject of these," and she made, with this advice, to be a very serious young woman. "What," I asked, "would you have me do with my spare time?" "I'm afraid I don't know." "Well, if you don't, who does?" "I think I see a compliment in what you say, but I'm not quite sure." "It's against rules, isn't it, to repeat a compliment? It would be no compliment then." "The more need to make it clear at first." "I thought I had." "Men think such a lot of things which are too unsubtle, too clumsy, for a woman to comprehend. Yes, it is so." "Men--myself--the Black Colonel?" "He is far away; why bring him back?" "Only because it may concern you, and anything which concerns you . . . is not to be spoken." "It is more interesting to speculate on what might have happened if he had stayed, instead of running from his guns--no, I mean to his guns, for he was no coward. Discount a good deal from him and he remains a taking man. It flatters any woman to be coveted by a man of parts, good or bad. She likes the homage thus implied, and if she did not she would be no woman. She says to herself, 'What a pity that man should be in love with me because I would not have him at all.' With her next breath she says, 'A resolute lover, something like a lover, a great lover.'" "The unconventional lover--and more," said I; "that's it, all down time, the primitive trait of sex, he who can lift a woman out of her groove into a surprise." "Well," said Marget, "the Black Colonel has the right blood for an unconventional lover. You cannot make a Farquharson respectable by force, and I'm not sure about the Gordons!" She looked at me with amusement in one eye and the rebel woman in the other and I laughed, and that was all. No; not all.