Ah," I whispered, "and the moral?"

"That you deserved to lose me; and that it would have broken my heart
if you had."

We sat very close, hand in hand, mind in mind, heart in heart, and
watched the sun go down behind the silent hills of our beloved
Corgarff, both of us silent, like them.

Years have gone by since then, and they have proved to us how sure a
conduct is the heart alike to happiness, and, though it matters less,
to prosperity. March where the tune of its soft beating calls, and you
are blessed. Traffic with it, and you miss the real lift of life, that
which makes life good, whatever betides.

Marget and I had learned this in the school of sweet-hearting, and now
we knew it in the joy of confiding words. Nothing else mattered,
because it mattered all, but when the inner world is well the outer
world responds to it in kind. The private happiness which we had won
made a larger good fortune for us without, or at all events, we saw the
morning radiance, not the morning mists.

Our poor ruined Highlands still lay under their covering of sorrow, as
grass grows indifferently upon a grave. But they were mending, even
while they suffered, for they had spirit in them. Virile men and
womanly women do not cry all the time, but give thanks to God for his
mercies and go forward.

It was my fortunate destiny to be helpful beyond myself at Corgarff,
and I will tell you how. When gossip of a purpose of marriage between
Ian Gordon and Marget Forbes reached high quarters, friends in the two
political camps got to work on our behalf. The outcome was that before
Marget Forbes became Marget Forbes, or Gordon, as the Scots legal form
has it, the lands which were her peoples had been returned to her, a
sort of wedding gift.

Good and bad news like not to travel alone, and what must a kinsman of
my own, an aged bachelor Gordon, do, but say that instead of waiting
for his estate until he was dead, and his will read, I should come into
it and its perquisites at once, if only because there must be acre for
acre exchanged, as between a Gordon and a Forbes. Thus our heart's
house of joy was dowered with worldly goods, though I should, in
justice especially to Marget, add that we laid no stress on that, apart
from the usefulness towards others which it carried.

At such usefulness, I can fairly say, we laboured whole-heartedly from
the hour when we took each other for better, and never a minute for
worse, in the Castle