Carrie Royde walked on along the road down the glen, and lightly though she swung her cromag her heart was heavy awhile to think of a Macdonald in this ancestral stronghold sighing for a city to which neither beauty nor romance ever accorded a testimonial. However, the bad taste of one degenerate Highlander was not enough to spoil the magic of the natural scene for long. Beside the road the Bogle babbling gently after nearly a week without rain kept her company. On the other side of the glen Ben Booey, Ben Gorm and Ben Glass towered, their lower slopes empurpled as richly by heather as the nose of Mac ’ic Eachainn himself by wrath. Two buzzards which she had the pleasure of supposing were eagles hovered in the crystalline air. A bobbing stonechat clicked at her from a boulder. A lanky blue mountain-hare scampered up the brae on the left of the road. A shaggy Highland bull eyed her from a field on the other side of the little river, and with that and a barbed-wire fence between him and her she waved her cromag at him as carelessly as if he were in the foreground of a picture by Peter Graham.

For some three or four miles she followed the road down the glen until she came to a narrow grass-grown turning where a mouldering signpost pointed to GLENBRISTLE and beside it a freshly painted notice-board nailed to a larch-pole proclaimed NO CAMPING. Carrie Royde decided to follow this even wilder-looking road. Mrs MacDonald had suggested driving along Glenbogle to pick her up and bring her back to lunch in case she grew tired of her own company. She was delighted by her own company and in no mood to be dragged out of ancestral reveries by her hostess. She was anxious to eradicate the belief prevalent in Glenbogle Castle that American visitors expected to be assiduously entertained all the time. Besides, she wasn’t feeling at all American at this moment. She was feeling more like Deirdre than anybody since Deirdre said farewell to Scotland.

Dearest Albyn,

Land o’er yonder,

Thou dear land of wood and wave.

These were as much of the words as she could remember, but she hummed to herself the tune in an ecstasy of romantic emotion, such an ecstasy that she kept quickening the tempo, and before she came to the end of the first verse Deirdre’s Farewell had turned into Oh, my darling, oh, my darling, oh, my darling Clementine.

Soon, however, the profound silence of Glenbristle, unbroken even by the babble of the smallest burn, made even the humming of a tune correctly seem a sacrilegious interruption of the stillness.