be received without prejudice and with all honour.
Everybody should have what we could give to eat and drink, and when
they set home again it would be from a warm welcome and a sincere
good-bye. Ah! if I could only have foreseen one acceptance of that
general invitation to the countryside; but I didn't, and how could I?
Men are not gods in wisdom, and how dull life would be it they were;
how dull especially for their women-folk who, thanks be, are not always
angels, except of light, and even they know how to darken the radiance.

The famous night came, and in good time came also Marget and her
mother, with their small group of servants from the Dower House. Our
largest room, where the dance was to be, a sort of hall of the Castle,
was filling with robust Highlanders in tartans, and with their
women-folk in their best gowns. Personally I felt easy and happy when
I shook Marget's hand, saying, "It is kind of you to help me, and
perhaps between us we are doing good." Then I conducted her and her
mother to seats on a low platform at the further end of the room and
quietly ordered the dance to begin.

A brace of fiddlers, seated in a corner, were scraping their catgut
into tune for the music, while, outside, a piper was playing a Highland
gathering. The Scots bagpipes yield their real melody in the open air,
and only then, and to me, from a little distance, they sounded loud and
rarely that cold star-lit night. The piper's business was this
overture, and presently, when it was completed, he would march in, as
grand as you like, and pipe us the first reel, in which Marget, I had
fondly thought, was to be my partner. Oh, everything was very well
arranged, and nothing happened as had been arranged, which is, perhaps,
the peculiarity of life, when we reflect on it as a perpetual drama.

Presently I heard a slight commotion, as if something had happened
unexpectedly, and then the hoof of a horse stamping the ground. The
sea of heads in the room, pulled by curiosity, bent towards the door,
and I realized that some surprise was approaching.

At that moment the piper, a Forbes man, to whom the honour of playing
had been given, struck up his reel and strode in upon us. He was big,
broad, imposing, with his kilted figure, and he seemed to halt, in
order that we might admire him, for a good piper and a peacock are
vain; but this was merely my fancy. What I saw, immediately following
him, was no fancy but staggering truth;