regshoe

Grateful and stunned—yes, exactly. <3 The exchange of the ring is both a very romantic and a very Jacobite thing—of course ring exchanges also take place between both Ewen and Charles and Ewen and Alison in this book, and it also features in White Cockades by Edward Prime-Stevenson, which is (not to put too fine a point on it) historical RPF slash fic about Charles himself.

And, argh, the final line of the chapter, about the ring... my heart.

That's a good question! I assume Keith just didn't hear the bit of the story where Ewen was supposedly found dead—perhaps that was made up later, and Keith didn't have time to hear it before leaving for the coast?