Carrie became obsessed by an urgent intuition that the home of her great-great-grandfather before it was pulled down and he was sent away in an emigrant ship to Canada had been in Glenbristle and that his spirit was leading her to its site. Besides her own Celtic origins she had dabbled a bit in Yogi. So she took several very deep breaths and surrendered her will to the influence she felt all round her. Her corporeal response was immediate. She seemed to be floating over rather than walking on the rough grass-grown road, and then on a green knoll about fifty yards up the brae on her right she saw the strewn stones and luxuriant nettles which still mark, sometimes centuries later, where once a human habitation stood. She had no doubt whatever that this knoll was the site of her ancestral home, and in high elation of spirit she made her way up to the top of it; and after meditating piously for a moment or two on the foundations of the cottage that were still clearly visible, this daughter of Glenbristle returning to it across a wide gulf of time and sea looked at her delicately diamonded wrist-watch, saw that it was high noon, and decided to eat her lunch.

“But there ought to be a burn close by,” she said aloud.

There was a burn close by, and convinced this was a clear case of ancestral memory Carrie Royde sat down on the grass cropped close by rabbits and untied the parcel of sandwiches the butler had made up for her.

“Yes,” she murmured, “I certainly have been here before.”

When she had finished her lunch and drunk of the water of the burn from cupped hands she stuck a cigarette in a long tortoiseshell holder ringed with diamonds and studied Gaelic Without Tears. The boat is here. The boat is there. Is the boat here? Is the boat there? The boat is not here. The boat is not there. Is not the boat here? Is not the boat there? The boy says that the boat is here. The boy says that the boat is there. The boy says that the boat is not here. The boy says …

The boy’s information about the boat’s whereabouts became vaguer and vaguer as the outline of the hills opposite flickered in the heat of the sun, and beyond the tobacco-smoke the landscape lost all definite form, blending in a rich blur of purple and green and grey and blue and receding from her as she floated back into the past. Wrapped in a plaid and barelegged, she was gazing anxiously up the glen for signs of the redcoats searching for her Prince, when she fell fast asleep.

Chapter 2

THE SCUFFLE IN THE HEATHER