“Those who have promised themselves the pleasure of passing a summer’s day exploring dark Glenbogle or wild Glenbogle as it is variously called, will do well to provide beforehand for the refreshment of the inner man. The grandeur and desolation which greet the eye on every side from the moment the wayfarer enters Glenbogle will amply compensate for the absence of any dwelling-place until the immediate surroundings of the Castle are reached. No, gentle reader, Glenbogle has no hotel, and the sophisticated traveller who expects teashops and restaurants should not wend his steps towards this historic spot. For him, however, who is content with a mossy bank for his resting-place, with water from the burn, and with the simple fare he carries in his knapsack, Glenbogle is ‘Paradise enow.’ Many a long summer’s day has the present scribe dreamed away in that delectable spot ‘far from the madding crowd,’ pondering upon the lore of the misty past and recapturing with the mind’s eye the stirring scenes of auld lang syne. The scent of the bell-heather and the bog-myrtle, the buzzing of honeybees, the babbling of the peaty burn, the solemn shapes of the old brooding bens, are not these better than the superficial luxury of our so-called civilisation? If we go to Glenbogle when ‘the world is too much with us’ there is no doubt what our answer will be.”

With a romantic sigh young Mrs Chester Royde laid down Summer Days Among the Heather and gazed out of the window in the North Tower of Glenbogle Castle at the Three Sisters of Glenbogle dreaming majestically in the flickering haze of a fine morning on the twelfth of August. She had some reason to sigh romantically, for this was her first visit to the home of her forefathers, one of whom, much against his will, had been deported to Canada by the twentieth MacDonald of Ben Nevis, the great-grandfather of the present laird. As a girl Caroline Macdonald had suffered from the Lone Shieling complex. She had seen the fairies in a peach-orchard on the shores of Lake Ontario. She had repined at not having been christened Flora, but had derived a measure of consolation from the thought that Caroline was the feminine of Charles. Then Chester Royde Jr., who was in Canada on business for his father’s great financial house in New York, had met Caroline Macdonald at a Toronto ball and she was persuaded to become Mrs Chester Royde Jr. Chester was no Prince Charlie. Indeed, Carrie’s friends all said they were surprised, after the way Carrie Macdonald had talked so much about Celtic romance and second-sight and Mrs Kennedy-Fraser’s Hebridean songs, she should go and marry a fat pug-nosed New Yorker with a double chin already at twenty-five and a complexion like a marsh-mallow. Yet Carrie’s friends weren’t so much surprised as they pretended: Chester Royde Jr. was the heir to the Royde millions, and well they knew it.