“Carry has no great love for the Highlands,” she said, laughing and slightly blushing at the same time; “but she need not have prepared so cruel a welcome for you.  Won’t you sit down, Major Stuart?  Papa will be here directly.”

“I think it is uncommonly clever,” the major said, fixing his one eye on the paper as if he would give Miss White distinctly to understand that he had not come to stare at her—­“Perhaps she will like us better when she knows more about us.”

“Do you think,” said Miss White, demurely, “that it is possible for any one born in the South to learn to like the bagpipes?”

“No,” said Macleod, quickly—­and it was not usual for him to break in in this eager way about a usual matter of talk—­“that is all a question of association.  If you had been brought up to associate the sound of the pipes with every memorable thing—­with the sadness of a funeral, and the welcome of friends come to see you, and the pride of going away to war—­then you would understand why ‘Lord Lovat’s Lament,’ or the ‘Farewell to Gibraltar,’ or the ’Heights of Alma’—­why these bring the tears to a Highlander’s eyes.  The pibrochs preserve our legends for us,” he went on to say, in rather an excited fashion, for he was obviously nervous, and perhaps a trifle paler than usual.  “They remind us of what our families have done in all parts of the world, and there is not one you do not associate with some friend or relative who is gone away, or with some great merrymaking, or with the death of one who was dear to you.  You never saw that—­the boat taking the coffin across the loch, and the friends of the dead sitting with bowed heads, and the piper at the bow playing the slow Lament to the time of the oars.  If you had seen that, you would know what the ‘Cumhadh na Cloinne’ is to a Highlander.  And if you have a friend come to see you, what is it first tells you of his coming?  When you can hear nothing for the waves, you can hear the pipes!  And if you were going into a battle, what would put madness into your head but to hear the march that you know your brothers and uncles and cousins last heard when they marched on with a cheer to take death as it happened to come to them?  You might as well wonder at the Highlanders loving the heather.  That is not a very handsome flower.”

Miss White was sitting quite calm and collected.  A covert glance or two had convinced the major that she was entirely mistress of the situation.  If there was any one nervous, embarrassed, excited, through this interview, it was not Miss Gertrude White.

“The other morning,” she said, complacently, and she pulled down her dainty white cuffs another sixteenth of an inch, “I was going along Buckingham Palace Road, and I met a detachment—­is a detachment right, Major Stuart?—­of a Highland regiment.  At least I supposed it was part of a Highland regiment, because they had eight pipers playing at their head; and I noticed that the cab horses were far more frightened than they would have