“Six good days it’s taken me to prepare for this evening, and now just because that Mr Royde isn’t back in time for dinner He must want to charge through my dinner like a bull in a china-shop. Disgusting isn’t the word for it. What are you doing with those peas, Flora? For goodness’ sake, girl, go away and do nothing if you can’t do something better than anything. Well, really, Mrs Parsall, these Highland girls are enough to try the patience of an angel in heaven. Tell Mr Toker, Alec, it’s not a bit of good him fidgeting and fretting me. No dish can be served quicker than what it can be served. Consideration, Mrs Parsall? He doesn’t know the meaning of the word. After that lunch I had to prepare for thirty-four! And now dinner’s shovelled into them quicker than anyone could shovel coal into a range! Maggie, if you’re going to stand gaping like that, go and gape outside of my kitchen, girl. Why doesn’t Mrs MacDonald stop Him, Mrs Parsall? But it’s always the same at every one of these blessed Gatherings. They just go to His head.”

In the dining-room Ben Nevis was hoping that Carrie did not feel it was heartless of them all to be enjoying their dinner while she and for that matter all of them were so anxious to be off in search of her husband. Had anybody been watching Toker at that moment he would have noticed that at the word ‘enjoying’ his face contracted like the face of one who had bitten recklessly at a chocolate under the impression that it was filled with fondant and found too late from an exposed nerve that it was filled with caramel.

“Iain, you’re through with your fish. I wish you’d go round to the back and muster the first party. The moon’s already up. You won’t want more than one or two lanterns to give Royde a chance of sighting you and giving a shout. I suggest you cross by the bridge and comb the other side of the river. And look here, Murdoch. I think you’d better take a party with pitchforks and see if by any chance he’s in trouble with the bull.”

“Oh, Ben Nevis!” Carrie gasped.

“I don’t think he is for a moment,” he assured her. “But it just occurred to me he might have crossed over the Bogle to get away from being stared at and wandered into the bull’s field. Ordinarily that shorthorn is as decent and docile a beast as you’d meet anywhere, but your husband’s plaid may have excited him. Of course, it wasn’t red, but the bull may have thought it was red, if you see what I mean? Don’t you think that’s possible, Hugh?”

“Very possible indeed,” the laird of Kilwhillie agreed with conviction.