“His Highness has the gift of knowing when to keep awake,” she said, a little undernote of pride and tenderness in her voice—“the gift of knowing when to sleep.”
And her faith was justified. The Prince came down two hours beyond the time that Kingsborough had planned—came down with a light step, and a face from which sleep had wiped away a year of sorrow. He bade farewell to the laird’s wife, who was crying like a child to see him so pleasantly in love with danger, and was turning from the door, when he began to bleed at the nose. Kingsborough’s wife handed him a kerchief, bewailing the ill omen.
“No,” said the Prince, with unconquerable twisting of crooked issues to a clean, straight shape. “The omen’s good. Blood has been shed for me, and I’m paying a few of my debts, Mrs. MacDonald. I should not like it to be said that I left your Highland country a defaulter.”
The three of them set out—the Prince, and Flora, and Rupert—and Kingsborough turned suddenly from watching the Stuart out of sight. “By God, wife,” he said suddenly, “we’ve given houseroom to a man!”
“He’s for death, Hugh,” the goodwife answered, her thrifty mind returning to calculation of the odds against the fugitive.
Kingsborough took a wide look at the hills, where sun and mist and shadows chased each other across the striding rises. “Death?” he snapped. “It comes soon or late—but the soul of a man outrides it.”
It was on their way to Portree that the three fugitives learned how clearly Miss MacDonald’s faith in her Prince had been justified. They met a shepherd—Donald MacDonald by name—who told them that, two hours before, “the foreigners” had been up and down between Portree and Kingsborough, searching for the Prince. They had left the island a half-hour ago, he added, following some new rumour that his Highness was still hiding in South Uist.
“If I’d not slept so late, we should all three of us have been taken, Miss MacDonald,” said the Prince, as they went forward.
“I trusted you,” she answered. And the quietness of her voice rang like a bugle-call.
And Rupert, with that fine sixth sense that a man learns from hazard and night-riding, knew that these two were talking with the freemasonry of souls that have learned kinship and proved it through long, disastrous roads.