Now tell me, oh, tell me, which one did the deed?

Was it Iain, the Red Macintosh of Loch Stuffie,

The foulest of all of Clan Chattan’s foul breed?’

“‘Yes, Flora, sweet Flora, ’twas Iain of Loch Stuffie,

Who stabbed with his sgian thy Ronald’s true heart,

For jealous was Iain of thy love for young Ronald

And made up his mind two fond lovers to part.’

“‘Oh mother, dear mother, I hear the pipes wailing,

Oh, mother, dear mother, the coffin is here,

Why didst thou not …’”

“Oh, please, Mr Fletcher,” Carrie interrupted, “I really don’t think I can listen to any more of that poem. It’s a little bit too appropriate.”

“But this happened more than two hundred years ago,” the chaplain explained with a reassuring smile, “though they do say that the ghost of Ronald MacDonald still haunts the spot where Iain Roy Macintosh murdered him. Flora, who was a daughter of the MacDonald of Ben Nevis of that time, killed herself, as I tell in the rest of the poem. Shall I go on?”

“No, please, I’d rather you didn’t, Mr. Fletcher. It’s so terribly realistic.”

“But I’ve tried to preserve a happy mean between romance and extreme realism. What I forgot to tell you was that this was Flora’s bower and it’s said that her ghost is sometimes seen making its way from the tower to keep a tryst with the ghost of her murdered lover.”

“Oh, please, Mr Fletcher …” Carrie was protesting again when she stopped abruptly and cried:

“Hark! That’s not an owl.”

“No, no,” the chaplain agreed, “that’s definitely a deeper note than an owl’s, and more persistent.”

Persistent was perhaps rather lacking in colour as an epithet for the almost continuous howling that seemed to come through the floor of what had been the ill-fated Flora’s bower of long ago.

“That is Chester’s voice,” Carrie declared, after listening intently for a while. “It’s the noise he used to make when he was a cheer-leader at Yale. I didn’t know him in those days, but I heard him howl like that for the Carroway Indians in Canada and they said it made their traditional war-cry sound kind of tame. Hugging Bear, the Carroway chief, asked Chester if he’d mind terribly if they used it as a new war-cry for the tribe and Chester said it was O.K. by him so long as they didn’t come and do it at New Haven during the match against Harvard.” She listened again. “Oh, yes, that’s Chester sure enough, but where is he?”

She ran across to the window and flung open a casement. “You can’t hear it so well from here,” she said. “It must be somewhere inside the tower.”