So they did, Echt snoozing white in its stour, bairns playing about the doors of the houses, Ewan went into a shop and bought pieces, Chris went to help: loaf, butter and milk, some cakes and a knife, they looked loaded down for a feast or a famine, or tinks on the road, fair shocking Echt. Ellen showed her bit English mettle at once, no pride, she caught up the loaf and the bottles, some of the bairns cried after them, she laughed and didn’t mind, kitten not cat. Then Chris led them off on the ploy she’d planned.

The Hill of Fare towered high in the sun, scaured and red, the flow of heather like a sea of wine, leftwards, dark, the Barmekin haunted even in July’s sun-haze. Chris cried Oh, wheesht! to the others and they stopped, looked at her, listened, and heard through the sun, lonely, unforgotten, never-stopping that plaint, the peesies flying over Barmekin. Twenty-three years and they never had stopped…. And Chris thought half-shamed, in a desperate flyting: Losh, but their throats must surely be dry!

And at last through the litter of the wild-growing broom choking the upward track, they came to the croft of Cairndhu where Chris had been born, rank thistles all about, the windows were shuttered, grass crept to the door, another and bigger farm long syne had eaten up the land and the implements. They poked their heads inside the out-biggings, the barn musty with a smell of old hay, rats scampered there in the sun-hazed gloom, Chris wandered from place to place like one seeking that which she wouldn’t know—maybe something of that sureness mislaid in the past, long ago, when she was a quean. But here was nothing, nothing but change that had followed every pace of her feet, quiet-padding as a panther at night.

When she turned away from the biggings at last she found Ellen and Εwan sitting on the mill-course, speaking low and clear to each other, not to disturb her, cat-like the two of them, unheeding the sun, haunted by no such memories as hers. Daft not to have known from the first that this meant nothing to them, ruined biggings on a little farm: her old frere the land was nothing to them, children of touns by love or by nature, Εwan born in a croft in Kinraddie knew little of the land, cared less, not his job—that was stoking a furnace in Gowans and Gloag’s!

He asked where now, and said Chris was the guide, and she pointed up to the Barmekin shining high and flat in the air against the tops of the further hills: I haven’t been there since I was a bairn. Ellen said Well, you don’t look as though that was long ago, and Chris asked Am I as bairn-like as all that? and Ellen flushed and said she hadn’t meant that—it’s just you don’t possibly look as though Mr Tavendale here were your son. Chris smiled at him. But he is, worse luck, Ewan nodded, a kindly joke in his compass: The luck’s all mine. Come along then. Carry your parcel, Chris?