“Do you then dislike Captain Windham so much?” asked Alison quickly.
“I do not dislike him at all,” Ewen assured her, “though I confess that I cannot quite make him out. But I have no desire for the continual rencontres with him which Angus promises me. And I am sure that Captain Windham cannot possibly view me with anything but dislike for capturing him—and now comes yesterday’s affair.—Don’t look so troubled, my heart!”
“Tell me what Angus said.”
Ewen looked at her a moment as if considering. “But you must not believe it too implicitly, darling; I do not. Though I admit,” he added, as though wishing to be quite just, “that the old man’s predictions have sometimes fulfilled themselves in an extraordinary way. . . . This one began by something about a heron.”
“That, then, was why you were so much surprised on Friday evening,” interpolated Alison in a flash. “I mean, when Captain Windham said that a heron had brought down his horse. I saw it, Ewen. But how——”
“I will tell you from the beginning,” said her betrothed. He got up and put a knee on the window seat. “It was that day at the end of last month when Lochiel’s message came about the Prince’s landing—you remember? Early that morning Lachlan had been very troublesome, wanting to shoot the heron that lives on the island in the loch, because his father had been having a vision about one. I forbade him to do it.—That reminds me, I have not seen the bird of late, but I do not think that Lachlan dare have disobeyed me.—After I had taken leave of you that evening, darling, and was just about to set off to Achnacarry, I met Angus by the Allt Buidhe burn. He had come down from Slochd nan Eun on purpose to see me, and he told me very solemnly that I should soon meet with a man whose destiny would in some unknown way be bound up with mine, and that I should meet him through the agency of a heron. Angus went on to say, ‘And as the threads are twisted at your first meeting, foster-son, so will they always shape themselves at all the rest—a thread of one colour, a thread of another.’ I said on that, ‘At all the rest, Angus? How many more, then?’ and he thought a while and answered, ‘I saw you meeting five times. The first time and the last were by water . . . but always the place changed. Oh, my son, if only I could know what it means!’ I asked then whether I ought to avoid this man, and Angus said, ‘You will not be able to avoid him; the heron by the waterside will bring you to him.’ ‘Ah,’ said I, ‘that then is why Lachlan wanted to shoot the curra this morning!’ But Angus shook his head and muttered, ‘A man cannot change the future in that way. What is to be will be.’
“I thought at the time, Alison,” went on Ewen explanatorily, looking down at her intent face, “that I should come on this man some day, if ever I did, when I was out with a fowling-piece, or something of the sort, and then, to tell truth, I forgot all about the matter in the stir of the news from Moidart; and thus it never crossed my mind when I encountered Captain Windham that he could be the man . . . till he mentioned the heron which startled his horse, and so indirectly—or directly, if you will—led to my overtaking him by Loch Oich, and our fight.”
“And is that all that Angus said?” asked Alison breathlessly.
“There was one thing more, I remember, for when, after he had assured me that I should not be able to avoid this man, I said, ‘He is an enemy, then?’ Angus replied, ‘That I cannot see. He will do you a great service, yet he will cause you bitter grief. It is dark.’ You know how vexatious it is when one with the two sights cannot see any more. It is like beginning to read a book of which the last pages are lost.”
“I do not think that I should wish to read any more,” said the girl, shivering a little, and she too got up from the window seat. “I have never before met anyone who had the gift so strongly as Angus, and indeed it is not canny. You are used to it, Ewen, since you have known him all your life, and I think you do not believe in it very much, either.”