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herself in this barn, had thought, adventure at last.
    MacGregor removed his arm from her back and stood up. “Say so or say not; rise or rise not, at your pleasure, milady,” he said mockingly. “Our affairs are at an end. We are quits.”
    Elisabeth felt a strange pang at his words. She rose and smoothed her chemise and gown down her legs, wincing at the weight of the fabric upon her backside. MacGregor had walked to the barn door and was looking out of it, his back to her. The flames were high enough now and the night dark enough that flickering shadows danced on the stacked hay.
    “Did I not say,” she began, in the prideful tone she knew she must use with him, “that I would visit this outrage back upon you?”
    He turned to look at her, silently, for a long moment. Then he said, “Aye, lass. That you did. I merely meant that I have no further plans to visit my own outrage upon your arrogant rump. Our future dealings must be as they may.”
    Suddenly, to her surprise, Elisabeth began to weep. She felt the haughtiness go out of her, fleeing in terror, and the sorrow at the destruction of her castle rush in upon her heart. She covered her eyes with her left hand and rubbed her brow, trying in vain to control herself.
    Then she felt MacGregor’s arms about her. She struggled and shook her head, but his strength enfolded her, and she finally laid her head upon the rough wool that covered his chest.
    “Hush, milady,” he said. “It will be alright.”
    “How will it possibly be alright?”
    “You will get word to your father, and he will come for you and bring you to him in Castle Grant or in Edinburgh, wherever he is bound.”
    Elisabeth felt something strange rising inside her heart. She freed herself from MacGregor’s arms, resolutely pushing against him with insistence but without any violence, so that he could tell she had calmed herself.
    She took a step back and looked him in the face. “No,” she said. “I will stay in the Highlands.”
    MacGregor’s brow furrowed in incomprehension. “How will you do that, now?”
    “I will stay with you.”
    He laughed in disbelief and confusion. “And how will that be? As my shepherdess?”
    “As your servant, if I have to. I will not leave the shores of Loch Ness until Castle Urquhart is rebuilt, or my life is at its natural end.”
    “A sentiment worthy of the Highlands, milady, but I am afraid I have no room in my house for baronesses waiting for their castles to rise again.”
    “What have you room for, then, MacGregor?” Strange as it was, this path seemed to her the right one, the one along which ran true pride.
    His lip curled in scorn. “A wife, milady. Would you wed a MacGregor?”
    His scorn roused her ire, but anger was far from the only emotion that made her say the fateful words that came next. “I would, if it kept me on the shores of Loch Ness.”
    He laughed a full laugh—the same full laugh that had put him in the pillory just that afternoon, a time that seemed a long age since, now.
    “To have the Lady of Urquhart to wife. A very fine jest, milady.” He bowed to her mockingly.
    “I am not jesting, MacGregor,” she said, narrowing her eyes and setting her mouth firmly. “You shall have me, if you will.”
    The Highlander shook his head, clearly sure that her grief had stolen her wits away. “Think on it, milady, for a moment. I should have to be mad, shouldn’t I? Your father will return someday, and your castle may well rise again, and what would then become of Angus MacGregor, who wed the laird’s daughter when the laird fled down the loch?”
    “He would be my wedded husband, and I should stand by him as would be my duty before heaven.” She could hardly believe she was uttering the words she heard herself saying, but they seemed to come from a part of her deeper than any she had ever plumbed. Was she like her loch, then, whose greatest depths no man had ever sounded?
    Angus seemed to consider this more seriously than he had