Myrtle undoubtedly was enjoying herself, but an observer would have been right in dissociating her enjoyment from the company of the two young men, whose conversation indeed was hardly more enlivening than a couple of megaliths. Ben Nevis had noticed optimistically the opportunities a two-seater sports car offered to develop an understanding between two young people. He forgot his second son’s lack of conversation and was also unaware of the American point of view which makes dumbness and stupidity synonymous. Iain had more to say than Murdoch, but Myrtle Royde was twenty, and a month or two past the final stage when College boys are interesting to the majority of the female sex.

“Well, I envy you your lovely country,” she had exclaimed when Kilwhillie had commented to her brother on the enjoyment he had fancied in the brightness of her dark-brown eyes and the rosy flush upon her cheeks.

“It’s not bad,” the sailor agreed.

“Not bad, indeed? Why, Lieutenant MacDonald, it’s divine.”

Murdoch knitted his brows. He wished she would not call him Lieutenant MacDonald, and that if she must she would not pronounce it “Lootenant!”

“I used to think my sister-in-law Carrie crazy when she was always on at Chester to take her to Scotland, but I understand it now. I wish I had Scotch ancestors myself. Look at that lovely lake shining away down there. We used sometimes to spend the summer in Vermont when we were children, and that’s lovely, too. But I think it’s the romance here that gets me. Look at your father now. What a wonderful figure of a man he is! You can fancy him leading his clan into battle, can’t you? Oh, I tell you I’m just in a sort of dream state. And so’s Carrie. And I think Chester’s pretty taken with it. I noticed a look in his eye I’ve never seen before when the pipers came in at dinner last night.”

“I think they’re rather boring as a matter of fact,” said Iain.

“Mr MacDonald, how can you say that? Why, I was getting thrills all down my back every time they passed behind my chair.”

But Myrtle was spared further disillusionment by the voice of Ben Nevis asking if the guns were ready to move off.

“Drumcockie this afternoon, eh, Ben Nevis?” asked a thin elderly man in plus fours, with a white toothbrush moustache, his countenance dyed an indelible brownish-yellow by the Indian sun.

“Yes, and if we do as well as we did this morning, we ought to make a record.”

“Hope we do,” said the thin man.

Chester Royde asked Kilwhillie who the thin man was. He had not caught his name when they were introduced.

“Colonel Lindsay-Wolseley of Tummie.”

“Say, I don’t have to call him Tummie, do I?” the young financier enquired anxiously.