“No, I do not,” admitted her lover. “But it would not be kind to tell my foster-father so.”
Alison looked out of the window for a moment, biting her lip hard. “Ewen, when a taibhsear ‘sees’ any person it is nearly always a warning of that person’s imminent death!”
Ewen put his arm round her. “No, you are wrong, my dear. A taibhsear has been known to see a man’s future wife—sometimes, indeed his own. I wonder Angus never ‘saw’ you, sitting by the hearth here in the days when you were in Paris . . . long days those were for me, mo chridhe! Moreover, in this matter of the heron he ‘saw’ two people, and neither Captain Windham nor I can be going to die very soon, can we, if we must meet each other four times more?”
She looked up and met his expression, tender but half quizzical. “No, that is true.”
“Angus said nothing about death,” went on Ewen reassuringly. “And he seemed completely puzzled by his vision—or visions. If it were not for that heron by Loch Oich, I vow I should think that he had dreamed the whole business.”
“Have you told Captain Windham any of this?” asked Alison.
“Not I. He would only laugh at it, and I am sure, too, that he has no desire to meet me again, so that I should not be telling him anything to pleasure him.”
“Do you think,” suggested Alison slowly, “that Angus did not hinder his sons and the others from attacking Captain Windham because he thought that he would be better out of the way—on your account?”
Her lover looked down at her with a rather startled expression. “I never thought of that. . . . But no, I do not believe that was the reason—it could not have been, unless he was lying over the reason he gave me.”
“And what was that?”