It was, in fact, the temperature of the drink that proved the hotel grand. We made acknowledgments there, and in the wide lounge, looking out on the sea front, we listened to the travelling world.

Two French women behind us had not been able to get rooms and talked much but not volubly. In front, the head of a family indicated an arresting sunset, for it must have been now about ten o‘clock, but the daughter, slim and brown-haired with nails tapered and delicately pink as her flesh, hardly bothered to look out, as if all the beauty were a setting for that which her petulant brows suggested she hadn’t got and for which she was so palpably prepared. A thin alert old man with grey hair talking of sunsets! And a thin bony-faced woman backing him up! She picked up a slightly soiled copy of the Tatler. Three men and two women discussed the dinner, which clearly had had its good points for them. One of the men read out of a newspaper, approvingly, about Royalty in Scotland to illustrate something. In a corner, male heads bent over a table and listened to a low voice and jerked back and laughed. ‘That’s a good one!’ said one. ‘Dem good!’ A steamer arriving unexpectedly at the North Pier caused a slight commotion by a window. The Mate was still awaiting his telephone call, but we were in no hurry, and the waiter was a thoughtful young man. We had nothing to catch—or lose, and far away and multitudinous was the hum of the sea in our ears—even if the Crew implied that it was no more than the hum of our blood from over-eating. But she herself now and then put her hands to her cheeks to still the glow from the day that now, more than ever, she would not have missed.

With good news from the telephone, we rowed across the harbour in a state of pleasant well-being, glad to head for our own quiet corner, where we called a good-night to the Islesman and lit our lamp. The Mate pumped, and then put his head in at the door.

‘Do you think’, he addressed the Crew, ‘that he has anything good in his heart? The well water is here.’

I never yet had a nice little private store of something very special but it was stolen from me.

In our short stay, we got to know Oban fairly well. Down a side street we found a plumber’s shop with a smiling girl and obliging workmen. We had suffered nothing less than torture from the water tap. It had been hit by some wanton hammer in Skye and the cock, fitting badly, leaked, so that we had had to screw up the under nut very tightly, and as the handle of the tap was missing and the best-fitting spanner too big, drawing water was a matter of stresses and slips and barked knuckles. Often, too, when we got it opened, the spanner would slip when we tried to close it, and manners were temporarily dislocated as the precious water gushed over the flooring and into the bilge.