.

Her heart, so far, was all in the open joy of living, though in the
troublous times which surrounded her and her family, she found burden
enough of sorrow. She was a flower of the heather, opening late, like
it, but perhaps with the same red, rich bloom, for it was not hard to
divine that elements of high possibility were enclosed in her young
womanhood. It gave you, for all its simplicity, a sense of latent
treasure, when it should fully open, even, it might be of surprise to
herself.

Seventeen! they say, when girlhood is trembling, quivering on the
portal of womanhood, a world of mysteries. But it is not half so
dramatic as twenty-five, when a woman, if she be rightly healthy in
mind and body, comes into woman's estate, feeling, desiring, some
earlier, some later, but roughly then. Peril is there, as well as
beauty, for then all the Margets in the wide world are pulling at the
silky bonds of sex, thinking these will stretch and stretch, only to
find, perhaps, that there is a strain at which they must break or
surrender.

If the insurgency of newly-found womanhood can be fitly employed all is
well, but remember that most women are, in thought, rebels for romance.
Nature, too, runs fullest in the veins of those who live with her
naturally, aloof from the veneer of society. Nature is lusty in
Nature's lap, and she mothered our Corgarff without let or hindrance,
in sun and in snow, Marget Forbes included.

You are to suppose a region far removed even from such a niggard
commerce of life as there was then in the Scottish Highlands. It is
sixty miles from the warming salt-wash of the sea, and has winds nearly
as cold as those that blow from the Arctic. This is because it stands
high, and is so bare of trees that they blow unbroken over its area.
They catch you with their ice tang in them, untouched by long,
sheltering woods, or soft, rolling dales, and they make your face
tingle into red and white, the blushes of Mother Nature.

That is the winter, when the land is often covered with snow, and the
little burns of the hills are frozen into snake-like icicles. If the
picture is hard, it is nevertheless beautiful, looked out upon from the
comfort of good clothes and a full stomach. It invites you to explore
it, to follow that far track ending on the snow-line of Morven, or yon
other, which dips and is lost in the riven sides of Lochnagar. The air
sings through your lungs with the force of strong drink and m