 This novella is set just before the Battle of Culloden (1746) in which the Jacobite forces were defeated and brutally scattered by the Hanoverian army.Sally Niven is an attractive and virtuous young woman, servant to the minister of her parish, and in love with Peter Gow the smith.Peter inadvertently shoots dead a man who is conducting an illicit burial in the churchyard, and Sally concocts a lie that he was preventing a grave-robbery, which enables him to escape punishment.