“Here is a sprig of oak for your bonnet, Ewen—you’ll be wearing your clan badge now, I’m thinking. I picked it yesterday.” And she fastened beside the eagle’s feathers a little bunch of sere leaves. “And see, I have made you a new cockade . . . I doubt you’ll get your clothes mended properly. England’s a dour place, I’m sure. Oh, I wish you were not crossing the Border!”
“Nothing venture, nothing win,” replied Ewen tritely, looking down at his bonnet, about which her fingers were busy. “I doubt, for my part, that those oakleaves will bide long on their stalks, Alison, but you may be sure I’ll wear them as long as they do. And the cockade—’tis a very fine one, my dear—I’ll bring back to you somehow. Or maybe you’ll get your first sight of it again in London!”
“I wonder will you meet Captain Windham anywhere in England?” said Alison.
“How that fellow runs in your head, my darling! I vow I shall soon be jealous of him. And I marching away and leaving him here in the Castle—for I suppose he is there still. Make him my compliments if you should meet him before setting out for Ardroy,” said Ewen, smiling. For to Ardroy were his betrothed and her father retiring in a day or two.
“Ewen,” said the girl seriously, taking him by the swordbelt that crossed his breast, “will you not tell me something? Was there ever a danger that, from the injury Captain Windham did you, you might never have had the full use of your hand again?”
“Why, what put that notion into your head?”
“A word you let fall once, and an expression on Dr. Cameron’s face one day when I mentioned the hurt to him.”
“For a day or two Archie did think it might be so,” conceded her lover rather unwillingly. “And I feared it myself for longer than that, and was in a fine fright about it, as you may imagine.—But, Alison,” he added quickly, as, exclaiming, “Oh, my poor darling!” she laid her head against him, “you are not to cast that up against Captain Windham. It was I that took hold of his blade, as I told you, and I am sure that he never meant——”
“No, no,” cried Alison, lifting her head, “you mistake me. No, I am glad of what you tell me, because that hurt he did you is perhaps the fulfilment of the ‘bitter grief’ which Angus said that he should cause you . . . only happily it is averted,” she added, taking his right hand and looking earnestly at the two red, puckered seams across palm and fingers. “For that would have caused you bitter grief, Ewen, my darling.” She covered the scars with her own soft little hands, held the captive hand to her breast, and went on, eagerly pursuing her exegesis. “Indeed, if for a time you believed that you would be disabled always—how dare you have kept that from me?—he has already caused you great grief . . . and so, that part is over, and now he will only do you a service!”
But Ewen, laughing and touched, caught her to him with his other arm.