"I am sorry your ladyship is displeased," I said coldly. Scot clings to Scot, and she did not like it.
"Displeased, ye daft gomeril!" she retorted. "And I suppose you'll be pleased, and Margaret will shout for joy, if ye get a dirk in your assistant aide-de-camp's ribs ane o' these fine nights. Just understand ance for a', my friend, that a Highlander kills a man wi' as little compunction as an Englishman squashes a beetle. There's nane o' your law-and-order bodies beyont the Highland line."
"Nothing but common murderers!" said I hotly. "I have heard much of the virtues of the Highlanders of late, but this surprises me."
"Hoots! Murderers?" she cried. "No such silly Saxon whimsies. They've got as many virtues as any Englisher that ever snivelled prayer and shortened yardstick. Murderers! Hoots, my mannie! Just removers of difficulties!"
So she turned it off with a jest in her pretty way, and got up and jigged along the corridor with me after her, longing to jig it with her, but hobbled by my new dignity. I had no clear notion of an assistant aide-de-camp's duties, but felt that they required a certain solemnity of manner inconsistent with her ladyship's grasshopper ways.
In the end, she dancing and I lumbering along, we came on a cheerful group collected in the corridor below. There was the Prince, the Duke of Perth, the Lord Ogilvie, the two Irishmen, Mr. Secretary, the Colonel, a strange lady or two, and Margaret.
"I thought your ladyship was lost," said Charles, smiling.
"On the contrary, sir," she retorted, "I was found."
"The usual explanation," he commented lightly.
"A most unusual explanation, sir," she countered deftly, "for Mr. Wheatman has been explaining how it came to pass that he kissed a ghost."