Chapter XX

.; and the pang we feel at parting with her is anything rather than a reproach against the author.

(3.) It is very certain, as the book stands, that the reader must experience some shock of disappointment when, after 200 pages of the most heroical endeavoring, David fails in the end to save James Stewart of the Glens. Were the book concerned wholly with James Stewart's fate, the cheat would be intolerable: and as a great deal more than half of _Catriona_ points and trembles towards his fate like a magnetic needle, the cheat is pretty bad if we take _Catriona_ alone. But once more, if we are dealing with _The Memoirs of David Balfour_--if we bear steadily in mind that David Balfour is our concern--not James Stewart--the disappointment is far more easily forgiven. Then, and then only, we get the right perspective of David's attempt, and recognize how inevitable was the issue when this stripling engaged to turn back the great forces of history.

It is more than a lustre, as the Dedication reminds us, since David Balfour, at the end of the last chapter of _Kidnapped_, was left to kick his heels in the British Linen Company's office. Five years have a knack of making people five years older; and the wordy, politic intrigue of _Catriona_ is at least five years older than the rough-and-tumble intrigue of _Kidnapped_; of the fashion of the _Vicomte de Bragelonne_ rather than of the _Three Musketeers_. But this is as it should be; for older and astuter heads are now mixed up in the case, and Preston-grange is a graduate in a very much higher school of diplomacy than was Ebenezer Balfour. And if no word was said in _Kidnapped_ of the love of women, we know now that this matter was held over until the time came for it to take its due place in David Balfour's experience. Everyone knew that Mr. Stevenson would draw a woman beautifully as soon as he was minded. Catriona and her situation have their foreshadowing in _The Pavilion on the Links_. But for all that she is a surprise. She begins to be a surprise--a beautiful surprise--when in