He looked at her hands. They were small, hardly bigger than a child’s. But there was something else. What was it? He stared for a moment before realizing. That mark. He’d seen it before. But where?

Her hands fluttered, he looked at her face, but it was still flushed with fever. But as he saw her face, curls tumbling down across her shoulder, it hit him. This was the daughter of one of his fathers tenants. Cecily MacKeller. Only. He hadn’t seen her since he left home at twelve years old.

He’d just now returned from his years of schooling in Edinburgh, riding his horse to his fathers home, when he’d found the woman fallen down on the path, in a feverish delirium.

He looked back at her hands, they were worn, had callouses on them. Something he’d never seen on the hands of the women he associated with.

Looking off over the hills, he pulled her shawl closer around her shoulders as she shivered from the cold and wondered what he was going to do.