And so it was afterwards, when they left Uist to go through constant perils, by land and sea. The Prince brought to it all--discomfort, pursuit outwitted by a hair’s breadth time after time--the same unyielding outlook. Fools and cowards might fold their hands, reconstructing yesterday and bewailing all the misadventures that might have been avoided had they done this, done that; but the Stuart took life up from each day’s beginning, and went forward, praying in entire simplicity that his shoulders might be broadened to the coming burden. When at last, near the end of June, they came near the Skye country, a new, surprising page was turned of the story of these hunted folk. Until now they had been among men, fighting the enemy at Culloden, eluding him during the incessant, long retreat. But now a woman stepped into their lives again; and, because faith and old habit had trained them that way, they were glad that a thread of gold had come to bind the rough wounds of life together. Not till he died would Rupert forget those days in the Western Isles. Their grace passed into abiding folksong before the year was out; and he was privileged to watch, step by step, the growth of a high regard such as the world seldom sees. He saw Flora MacDonald’s first coming to the Prince--at Rossinish, in Uist--saw the long, startled glance they exchanged, as if each had been looking for the other since time’s beginning. And then he saw her curtsey low, saw him lift her with tender haste. “I should kneel to you instead, Miss MacDonald,” he said. “You’ve volunteered to be my guide through dangerous seas, they tell me, and I fear for your safety, and yet--I ever liked brave women.” Rupert had changed his trade of messenger for that of boat-man, and was one of the six rowers who rested on their oars in the roomy fishing-coble that was waiting to carry the Prince to Skye. There was a wild gale blowing, but the June night was clear with a sort of tempered daylight, and Rupert watched these two, standing on the strip of sandy shore, with a queer sense of intuition. The discipline of night-riding, its loneliness and urgency, teaches a man to look on at any happening with eyes keen for the true, sharp detail of it; and the two figures, as he saw them now, seemed transfigured, secure for the moment in some dream of a past life they had shared together. There was the Prince, his head lifted buoyantly, his lips smiling as if Culloden had never been. There was Miss MacDonald--four-and-twenty, keen for loyalty and sacrifice--with something more than loyalty making a happy light about her face. She had none of the fripperies that set men’s wits astray and poison their clean hold on life; but, from her buckled shoes to her brown, shapely head, she was trim, and debonair, and bonnie, made to keep pace with men along the road of high endeavour.