these always seem to have
something fateful in them, as of a king's signature to a decree.
Moreover, I was vaguely conscious of being the guardian of a woman's
instinct for safety, an instinct which arrives with the cradle and only
goes with the grave, and that made me feel somewhat helpless; a man in
depths he cannot fathom, for such is the uncharted sea of womanhood.

Marget Forbes and her mother lived in the Dower House, thrown to them,
as a piece of bread might be tossed from a rich man's table, when
Corgarff was declared forfeit and the castle occupied by soldiery. Her
men-folk had been out with Charlie and had not come back from Culloden,
as the Cairn of Remembrance on the hills might have told any seeker for
them. Each clansman, as he departed, had put a stone to it, and none
had returned to lift that stone again, so it became a tombstone.

They were dead for ever to Corgarff and to the lands which had been the
property of their forbears, almost since time was in those
blood-heathered Highlands. Families rose and fell, for family reasons,
or as the clans to which they belonged prospered or had adversity.
Thus vital changes in a corner of the Scottish Highlands, like this of
ours, were more frequent than the historians, men apt to assess on
surface generalities and neglectful of the hidden human wells, usually
make out.

But, as the changes took place within what I may call the ring-fence of
the clan system, they really only mattered to those who were directly
concerned. Corgarff Castle, however, had been held by the same Forbes
family in direct, unbroken line, partly because its successive chiefs
had strong right arms, partly because the domain had little to make
anybody else covetous. The Sabine women whom the old Romans took,
would have been the beautiful ones, and it is the same with the face of
Mother Earth. What appears best is taken first!

There was no great personal bitterness in the Aberdeenshire Highlands
as between clans or families who were on different sides in the
"Forty-Five." The ambition, or the greed of chiefs, often determined
the sides, and a consciousness of that made lesser men tolerant with
each other. Thus, an acquaintanceship between Marget and her mother
and myself, although begun under a certain stress of circumstance,
passed naturally into friendship, and, on my part, into something
warmer. We were of the same Celtic strain, and, in the heart and mind
of upbringing, blood