Only you," he said, so softly I could barely hear him. "To worship ye with my body, give ye all the service of my hands. To give ye my name, and all my heart and soul with it. Only you. Because ye will not let me lie--and yet ye love me.

Your face is my heart Sassenach, and the love of you is my soul

Am I a man? To want you so badly that nothing else matters? To see you, and know I would sacrifice honor or family or life itself to lie wi' you, even though ye'd left me?

If ye loved him, he must ha' been a good man.' 'Yes, he...was.' 'Then I shall do my best to honor his spirit by serving his wife.

Character, I think, is the single most important thing in fiction. You might read a book once for its interesting plot—but not twice.

The rest of the journey passed uneventfully, if you consider it uneventful to ride fifteen miles on horseback through rough country at night, frequently without benefit of roads, in company with kilted men armed to the teeth, and sharing a horse with a wounded man. At least we were not set upon by highwaymen, we encountered no wild beasts, and it didn't rain. By the standards I was becoming used to, it was quite dull.

It was in a way a comforting idea; if there was all the time in the world, then the happenings of a given moment became less important.