He took her hand and kissed it. ‘Effie, listen to me. Yes, people will talk, some will even turn their backs – but I don’t care. You showed me what freedom is, you make me laugh. I never feel more alive than when I’m with you. It’s your very wildness that I love, don’t you see?’

She looked back at him. Even now, with no lies left between them, obstacles remained.

‘I can’t leave my father. He needs me.’

‘I know, and I had thought he could live in the house, with us, but Felton said he would hate that.’

She couldn’t help but smile. Felton was right. Her father wouldn’t manage all the stairs in the big house, far less be comfortable there. He was setting down his roots in this cottage. Every morning he picked an apple from the tree in the back garden for his breakfast, and with the potatoes, broad beans and carrots now planted in the lazybeds, he was digging in flower beds instead. It had taken him a while to accept something could be merely decorative and not purely functional, but a few of the gardeners – also Gaelic speakers, it turned out – had started to come over with some bare root specimens of honeysuckle and roses and gave him some pointers.

‘But Felton says he’s just through the trees there and he’ll still sit with him in the evenings. He’s going to train the pup to mind him too, so your father’ll not want for company or help. And we’ll send one of the maids up to keep house for him, and Mrs McLennan can dispatch Billy with his dinner. And we’d only be down there.’ His head tipped in the direction of the grand mansion. ‘You’d still see him every day.’

Effie blinked. He had thought of everything, but she knew the gamekeeper’s company was all the reassurance her father really needed. Day by day, he filled the hole left behind by her brother. Huw Felton was not a sentimental man, but he was a good one. ‘What did he say when you told him about us?’ she asked quietly.

‘He said . . .’ Sholto thought for a moment, a small puzzled frown puckering his smooth brow. ‘He said “Two never kindled a fire but it lit between them.” Does that mean anything to you?’

She just smiled. It was an old Hebridean saying and perhaps another sign of why Felton should have been her match – but her heart would not be told. It had been Sholto from the first moment.

Slipper nuzzled into her neck and Effie dropped her face into her fur again. ‘. . . Is she really mine?’

‘Felton said she was yours from the first moment. She’s your wedding present.’