“Oh, you’re camping, are you? I suppose you didn’t see the notice-board?” Carrie asked.

“We saw the notice-board right enough,” Buchanan said. “That’s why we are camping in Glenbristle.”

“We don’t recognize the right of lairds like Ben Nevis who have stolen the land from their clansmen to treat it as their own private property,” Macmillan explained.

“Why is Glenbristle a wilderness?” Buchanan asked in his best Glasgow University Union manner. “I’ll tell you why. It’s because the grandfather and great-grandfather of the present owner cleared out the crofters and drove them to Canada.”

“It’s strange you should say that,” Carrie Royde remarked pensively. “You see those stones and nettles over there?”

“They show that there was a cottage here once,” Buchanan said.

“There certainly was,” Carrie declared impressively. “The cottage of my great-great-grandfather who was evicted from Glenbristle in the first clearance.”

“That’s interesting,” Alan Macmillan commented.

“It is very very interesting,” Mrs Chester Royde Jr. agreed emphatically.

“How do you know this was where your great-great-grandfather lived?” James Buchanan asked.

Carrie would have liked to say that the site had been revealed to her in a dream by the spirit of an ancestor, and if Alan Macmillan had been alone she might have succumbed to the temptation; but she felt that James Buchanan’s bullet-head was too hard for such a tale, and instead attributed her knowledge of the evicted crofter’s site to family tradition.

“I used to dream about Glenbristle when I was a little girl living on the shores of Lake Ontario. Once upon a time in a peach-orchard I saw …,” she hesitated. It was a pity that a man privileged to wear that Joseph’s coat of a tartan should be so evidently drab in his point of view about existence. Alan Macmillan might easily have seen the fairies himself, but of course he would never admit it in front of his prosaic friend.

“Are you camping round here?” Buchanan asked her.

“No; I’m staying at Glenbogle Castle.”

The two young men stiffened.

“Oh, please don’t look so ferocious, both of you. If you knew Ben Nevis you’d think him most terribly kind.”

“We’re not likely to have the honour of making his acquaintance,” said Alan Macmillan proudly.

“I wouldn’t make it if we had,” Buchanan avowed. “It’s men like MacDonald of Ben Nevis who’ve brought Scotland to the position it’s in to-day.”

“But surely Scotland is in a perfectly wonderful position,” the returned exile ejaculated.

“Practically dead,” Buchanan declared firmly.

“But that’s not at all what we Canadians think. We think Scotland is the moving spirit of the British Empire.”

The two young men shook their heads compassionately.