“Very strong young ladies, sir,” Toker commented. “I never did think these hikers would contrive to keep Miss Catriona and Miss Mary long in durance vile, as they say. And I made so bold as to express that opinion to Mrs MacDonald when she was inclined to take it to heart so much after they were kidnapped by the hikers. Hullo, sir, look cut! I think there’s some more excitement coming our way. Yes, indeed, sir, by the living jingo, it’s Mr Iain, or I’m a footman. Pardon my excitement, sir, but nobody except Mr Iain could do it like that.”

Chester Royde looked out through the casement and by the glimmer of the dawn beheld a burly kilted form tossing hikers about. And then just as half-a-dozen more hikers sneaking up from behind seemed on the point of recapturing him, another kilted form dashed across the courtyard to the rescue and engaged them with his fists.

“Gee, that poet has a lovely punch,” cried Chester Royde as he charged from the postern into the fray.

A minute later Iain MacDonald was safe within the Castle.

“Capital bit of work,” the Chieftain pronounced. “You hit one of those brutes pretty hard, Macmillan. I don’t think you’ve met my youngest boy, Iain. This is Myrtle’s fiancé, Iain.”

Iain for one brief instant looked as much surprised as an undergraduate ever allows himself to look, but quickly recovered his normal imperturbability, and nobody could have supposed that he had spent much of the past sixty-six hours rolled up in a tent and tied with the ropes of it and that he had returned home to find one of his father’s guests engaged to what unless it had been Glenbogle Castle he would have vowed was a Scottish Nationalist.

“How many hikers do you reckon there are, Iain?” his father asked.

“Not far off a hundred.”

“Oh, is that all? Kenny Macdonald was putting them at over seven hundred last night.”

“He would,” said Iain.

“And what’s happened to Lachy and Roddy?”

“They’re probably still rolled up in tents.”

“Well, you’d better lie down for a few hours and get a bit of rest. We’ll wake you if there’s an alarm.”

“I’m all right, Dad. I’ve done enough lying down rolled up in that tent to last me for some time,” said Iain.

“You’d better go up and see your mother, girls,” Ben Nevis said to his hefty daughters, who had just come back from handing over Edith Bassett and Minnie Rogers to the grim guardianship of Mrs Parsall and Mrs Ablewhite, both of whom were drinking tea in the housekeeper’s room, an occupation in which they had been almost continuously engaged all night.

“Won’t she be asleep?” Catriona suggested.