The following evening, they were asked over to Auchnacerie for supper. Dan had at first thought about suggesting that he should cook the meal, but then remembered that his daughters did not hold his culinary delights in such high esteem as did the Trenchard family. So he left it to Katie to produce exactly what was required—hamburgers, baked beans, and chips—and for the first time since Millie and Nina had been in Scotland, Dan watched with relief how the simple comforts of fast food brought smiles back to their faces. With a good deal of help from Josh, Patrick made it to the supper table, his face drawn and dark rings under his eyes, but his indomitable spirit still burning as fiercely as a bush fire. He teased Millie rotten over her taste in clothes, and then suggested that Nina should hang on for Max, because even though he was five years her junior, he was going to be some looker. What delighted and surprised Dan was the way in which the girls took the ribbing, and Millie even gave back as good as she got when she told Patrick that his hairstyle was at the height of fashion—for scarecrows. Sitting next to Katie at the top end of the table, Dan caught her eye during the meal and the look that passed between read only that things were surely turning for the good. By the end of the evening, a slight flush of colour had returned to Patrick’s pallid features, and there seemed at last to be the beginnings of a mild acceptance by Millie and Nina that their week’s sojourn in the wild, unfashionable wastes of northern Scotland wasn’t going to turn out as badly as they had at first predicted.

On the Friday morning, the wind dropped and the rain clouds once more moved off eastwards over the tall stack of Ben Nevis, leaving the adjacent waters of Loch Eil and Loch Linnhe bathed by a pale autumnal sun. Before slipping quietly from the house, Dan left a note on the kitchen table for the girls saying that he felt they had done enough homework for the week, and that they should take things easy for the day. He added that they should maybe take advantage of the good weather and walk up to the tree and telephone their mother to tell her how they were getting on. However, he had little doubt in his mind that they would treat the day in similar fashion to those that had gone before, and that when he returned from work, they would still be lying prostrate on the sofas, tucked into their sleeping bags with their eyes glued to the television.

That evening, therefore, it was with considerable surprise and a certain amount of consternation that he read the note that lay alongside his own on the kitchen table. It was written in Millie’s flourishing scrawl.