"You are never Scots, sir!" she answered finally.
"No, but I know Scotland."
A light dawned in her eyes with the words.
"Ah, then you will be knowing the song that I sang! 'Lochaber No More' 'tis called, and a bitter lament of exiles out of their own homeland."
"No, I never heard it before—but I have a brother buried on a hillside far north of Lochaber, in the Clan Donald country."
The sorrow that came into her face was beautiful to see. None but a person who had Gaelic blood could have sympathized so instantly and so generously with a stranger's grief.
"That will have been the great sadness upon you," she cried in the odd way that the Highland Scots have of using English. "Oh, sir, your woe will have been deep! So far from his own home!"
"Yes," I assented; "and he an exile, too."
In that moment I felt for the last time all the old raging hatred of the Hanoverian usurper, the hatred that springs from blood spilled and unavenged; and even though the reason within me stilled the tempest that memory had stirred, I knew, or something within me knew, that I never could be happy under the immediate rule of King George.
"An exile!"