of Inverey, the last of his house, as I can say looking
back on him, and doomed, so a woman of second-sight had declared, when
he was born, to be the last; while I, Ian Gordon, was a cadet of the
Balmoral Gordons, captain in his Majesty's Highland Foot, with no more
to expect than what my commission brought me, and that was little
enough.

He was a Jacobite, keeping that rebel flame alive in the Aberdeenshire
Highlands, when, on the heels of the "Forty-Five," a red and woeful
time, we were half-heartedly scotching it with garrisons in the Castles
of Braemar and Corgarff. Yes, I wore the scarlet tunic of King George,
thanks to family circumstances which had woven themselves before I was
born, but the tartan lay under it, next my heart. We were rivals in
war, thrown on different sides by the fates which gamble so strangely
with mere men. Was there to be a still more vital rivalry? As has
been hinted, I had more than rumours of the Black Colonel's strange
powers among women. What if he had Marget Forbes in his dark eye?

Wherever the heart is concerned you have intuition, and that is why a
woman has more of such super-sense, or rather, I would say, of
wonderously delicate feeling, than a man. She needs it, being oftener
heart-strung, because the wells of her heart are more emotional.

I suspected, from the first, why the Black Colonel wanted to meet me,
and for no other reason would I have consented to meet him. But our
meeting had been so brief, so disturbed, so futile as regards its
purpose, that I had got no light from him whatever. Still, ever since
then I had been seeing, in the mirror of life, the face of Marget
Forbes, a daughter of the clan whose name she bore, a handsome lass
with a long pedigree, heiress to the lands of Corgarff, now forfeit for
the Jacobite cause, when they should come back to her line, and
incidentally, but all importantly, a kinswoman both of Jock Farquharson
and myself.

Memory is rarely honest with us, because it is imperfect, and
unconsciously we tell the best account of things, but I fancy I was
wondering on this text when there came at my door the sharp rap of
bony, hurried knuckles. "Enter!" I said, and in marched the corporal
of the guard. His hand went easily to the salute. He had a message in
his face.

"What is it?" said I, for I expected nothing of moment, beyond a poor
devil of a Jacobite captured, or a "sma' still" raided and its rude
whisky drunk by the red-coat