She laughed. "Because I know the clan, my lord!"
"How do you know?" I repeated, astounded.
"Because it is my own clan and name. Drogue-Forbes, Grant-Forbes!—a claymore or a pair of scissors can snip the link when some Glencoe or Culloden of adversity scatters families to the four winds and seven seas.... Well, sir, as the saying is in Northesk, 'a Drogue stops at nothing but a Forbes. And a Grant is as stubborn.' Did you ever hear that?"
"Yes.... And you are a Forbes of Northesk?"
"Like yourself, sir, we stop before a liaison."
Her rapier wit confused and amazed me; her sudden revelation of our kinship confounded me.
"Good God," said I, "why have you never told me this, Penelope?"
She shook her yellow head defiantly: "A would na," quoth she, her chin hanging down, but the brown eyes of her watching me. "And it was a servant-maid you asked to wife you, and none other either.... D'ye ken that, you Stormont lad? It was me—me!—who may wear the Beadlaidh, too!—me who can cry 'Lonach! Lonach! Creag Ealachaidh!' with as stout a heart and clean a pride as you, Ian Drogue, Laird o' Northesk!—laird o' my soul and heart—my lord—my dear, dear lord——"
She flung her arms across her face and burst into a fit of weeping; and as I caught her in my arms she leaned so on my breast, sobbing out her happiness and fears and pride and love, and her gratitude to God that I should have loved her for herself in the body of a maid-servant, and that I had bespoken her fairly where in all the land no man had offered more than that which she might take from him out of his left hand.
So, for a long while, we stood there together, clasped breast to breast, dumb with tenderness and mazed in the spell of first young love.