All nine participants of the course had reassembled ready for the next session, and all except Stanley were looking forward to it. Win, like various other people, had put her name down for a tutorial with Catherine and had been allotted the first session at three o’clock that afternoon. In the teeth of her husband’s discouragement she had taken several little pieces that she had secretly written over the years to show Catherine, and half an hour later had emerged in a glow of excitement at the encouragement she’d received. This she had unwisely shared with her husband and his ungenerous scorn and grumpiness had nearly taken her breath away, used as she was to disparagement from that quarter. But if Stanley expected his wife to give up the idea of writing and stick to warming slippers and making Victoria sponge cakes he had seriously under-rated her. She had quietly but firmly refused to be put off and had disappeared into the garden with pen and notebook to work on some of Catherine’s suggestions, leaving her husband at a loose end with no one to bore or bully.

Morwenna and Joyce had taken Bunty with them and gone by car to explore the small town of Blairalder, where Bunty, succumbing to an acute attack of Highland fever with alarming results, had bought herself an outfit in gaudy Royal Stuart tartan, complete with matching tamo’-shanter and, as Joyce had muttered to Morwenna, enough tins of Edinburgh rock to rot the teeth of all her relations for years to come.

Christopher had gone down to the loch in pursuit of solitude but found the Colonel had got there before him. Christopher thought that once he would have had no compunction in shaking him off, but the Colonel hailed the younger man with such genuine friendliness that he had neither the heart nor the bad manners to turn down the suggestion that they should go round the loch together. Before they were halfway round Christopher’s leg started to play up, but he would have died rather than admit he would like to turn back. If, by the end of the afternoon, he felt he knew a great deal about the Colonel’s regiment he was equally relieved not to be questioned about his own history.

They were all sitting in the kitchen, some at the big round table, some on the cosily squashy sofas and chairs at the far end of the room, fortifying themselves with mugs of tea and finding the brownies and shortbread that Morag, the Glendrochatt cook, had produced irresistible, when Giles came in holding the hand of a small boy.

‘Hi, everyone,’ said Giles. ‘Look what we’ve got! How’s that for a productive afternoon’s work? Show them, Rory.’