‘No,’ Flora said quietly, looking pensive. ‘But he’s definitely going to be all right?’

Effie couldn’t help but feel bemused by her friend’s excessive concern. Although they shared the same surname, Donald McKinnon wasn’t a relative of Mhairi’s. ‘Is absence making the heart grow fonder?’ Effie teased. ‘Are you missing us all over there while you idle the summer away?’

‘Idle?!’ Flora huffed, grabbing a stalk of grass from the wall and threading it through her fingers. ‘We’ve three hundred sheep over there.’

‘Aye, grazing and giving you no bother, from the look of things.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Just that you look bonny as ever. I thought it was hunger that had driven you back, but evidently not.’ Flora’s hair had an especially glossy shine to it and her skin a dewy plumpness. ‘The look of love.’ Flora always preened as the others complimented her.

Effie wasn’t sure she herself looked like that – she felt she must look more haunted than contented – and besides, she wasn’t even sure if this was love. She didn’t know what this feeling was.

‘There’s nothing bonny about spending a fortnight alone with Mhairi, let me tell you. She’s grown up with her brothers telling her tales about the McKinnon curse and dash if she doesn’t believe it! She’s frightened everything’s going to kill her or hers.’ Flora rolled her eyes. They both knew their sensitive, gentle friend suffered more than them in this wild life.

‘Well, you can tell her it’s all fine. No relatives harmed.’

‘But Donald’s not out of the woods yet?’

‘No, but if Lorna thought it really bad, she’d have sent him to the mainland.’

‘How?’ But as she asked the question, Flora lifted her gaze, fixing upon the yacht anchored in the bay. She gave a gasp. Effie was more surprised that she hadn’t seen it as she tore down the hill, but supposed it spoke to the level of her concern as she had run. ‘Whose is that?’

Effie sighed, staring at it too. It was an emblem of the distance between her and Sholto, a motif of their very different worlds. When she was with him, she could believe he was just a man with bright eyes and a ready laugh, who swam naked in the moonlight and flirted with her on mountain ledges, but the yacht was a constant reminder he wasn’t ‘just’ anything. ‘They’re friends of MacLeod. The Earl of Dumfries and his son. They brought the factor over.’

Flora gave a groan. ‘Eeesht.’

‘I know. We thought we got lucky that the men decided to make the trip to Boreray on account of the weather and they took Mathieson with them, giving us some peace. Only . . . two days later and they’re back again.’

‘Bad luck.’

‘Worse for Donald,’ Effie shrugged.