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they are,” Elisabeth replied. “I can walk barefoot if I must, though. How far do we go?”
    “I have run it in half an hour, across the braes,” Angus said. “With you, upon the road, at night, I think we have three hours before us.”
    “I shall do fine,” Elisabeth said proudly.
    Just then, however, they heard a man’s voice saying from within one of the little stands of trees that now dotted the side of the road as they approached the River Coiltie, where it joined the River Enrick, “Angus?”
    Angus replied, “Calum! Tell me true, now, are you not here past when you should be?”
    “Well,” said the voice, “I grew so wistful looking at the flames going up from yonder castle that I quite lost any sense of the passing night.” The kinsman who had freed Angus from the stocks stepped out onto the road.
    “What have we here?” he asked on seeing Elisabeth, in a tone that reminded her uncomfortably of the one Ian MacDonald had used in the market square.
    “Well, Calum, that’s hard to say in one way, and easy in another,” Angus replied. “Calum MacGregor, be presented to the Lady of Urquhart.”
    “Angus, I am not so easy to dupe as that, I suppose, but let me play along and give this poor girl who seems to have accepted your protection a welcome worthy of her.” Calum made an elaborate bow. “Milady,” he said.
    “I am pleased to meet you, sir,” Elisabeth said.
    Calum straightened as if he had been hit by an arrow. “How in heaven?” he asked.
    “I beg of you, kinsman, do not ask tonight. There will be time enough to tell the tale. Bring the cart out, and let us be on our way.”
    The oxcart was brought out from the trees, and Angus helped Elisabeth onto the board and got up after her. Calum climbed up on the other side and they started.
    The road wound west, and then north across the Coiltie and the Enrick, and then away from the shores of the loch and along the steep hillsides that climbed up and out of the Great Glen itself. Now they traveled, from the sound of it, along a little burn that came splashing down from a loch high above. There was no light but the faintest glimmer of moonbeams through high clouds that showed only a darkling landscape and, very rarely, the sight of what Elisabeth thought must be the distant window of a croft-house.
    Then, however, one of those lights appeared before them and stayed there and became three fainter lights instead of one, and abruptly, the road ended and Elisabeth could see that there were three croft-houses there, alongside a barn. So suddenly did it all seem to happen that she thought she must have fallen asleep, and then she realized that she had indeed fallen asleep on the board of the cart, leaning against Angus as he drove, and that he had his powerful right arm about her waist.
    She straightened abruptly and shook his arm off.
    Angus laughed. “A strange sort of betrothal this is, my girl. I was beginning to think you might be warming to me.”
    “Oh. Yes, er, MacGregor. Thank you,” she said as she hastily clambered off the cart. That same new, warm feeling had filled not just her loins, but somehow also her whole body at the feeling of his arm around her, and she was at pains not to show it.
    “Even your husband,” her governess in Edinburgh had said, “must not know the mysteries of your body.”
    “You are welcome, milady,” he said in a tone that indicated that she had indeed managed to mystify him. “Let us get inside and warm. Let us say nothing of my… proposal until the morning.”

Chapter Four
     
     
    After he showed Elisabeth to his own bed in his tiny croft-house, Angus went to Calum’s house, ten paces distant.
    “You are daft, Angus. You have the Lady of Urquhart in your bed—the nineteen-year-old, fair-as-a-lily Lady of Urquhart—and here you come to infest my bed with your lice.” He was not serious, to be sure. Angus knew what he assumed, which was what any sane man would assume if he saw a MacGregor escorting