these being familiar to you.

"The offer is put to me, however, as part of earlier overtures in those
same affairs, and that recommends it. Moreover, there are urgent
private reasons, not here to be gone into, but perhaps to be j'aloused
by you, which favour an early change of air and scenery for yours
dutifully. Accordingly I am departing for North America by the first
government ship on to which I can be smuggled, that, as I grimly note,
being the elegant word used in a dispatch of instruction to my hand.

"You cannot fail to be curious as to the nature of my mission, and I
shall inform you thereon so far as its delicate nature permits. I am
offered by Government--your Government--a free pardon for the past and
a captain's commission in Fraser's Regiment of Highlanders, now in
Canada with General Wolfe, if I succeed in the undertaking which is
this . . . but its delicacy tries my power of pen.

"Briefly I, a proscribed Jacobite, am to depart from Scotland, find my
way to Canada, and offer my sword and service to the Marquis Montcalm
commanding his French Christian Majesty's troops for the defence of
Quebec. There I am to keep an open eye, and a close tongue, for all
and every information of possible use to General Wolfe, and transmit
the same to him personally, by what safe channels I can devise. He is
to be informed of my mission, and he alone, and that's all, though it
may be enough for you to digest, as it has been, I beg you to believe,
for me.

"Will you, I pray, make my humble excuses to Mistress Marget Forbes and
her mother, and accept them for yourself, and you may rely upon hearing
from me oversea, because I have no intention to relinquish a shred of
my attachment to my native Highlands and the well-being of the name I
bear; whereof it is the purpose of this epistle to inform you, as
between one man of honour and another."

News indeed, intensely personal, therefore intensely interesting news,
and I let it be known without delay at the Dower House, taking care, in
delicacy, not to seem curious as to the impression it made there.
Somewhat later I had intelligence of the actual sailing of the Black
Colonel for New France, across the Atlantic, with his inseparable Red
Murdo, whom, I was sure, the adventure would suit grandly, though he
probably would not be told its secret meaning.

Then came a long silence, and I began to wonder whether the Black
Colonel had not, somewhere and somehow, been caught i