“I was positive you did. And listen, please don’t call me Mrs Royde when we’re just ourselves among the Brotherhood. Please call me ‘Carrie’ then. How long do you expect to be camping in Glenbristle?”

“We were planning to move on nearer to Fort William to-morrow,” said James. “I have to be back in Glasgow by the end of the week.”

“Isn’t that too bad! And you, Alan?”

“I’ll find a place to camp by myself for a week. I want to do some work.”

“I believe you’re going to write a poem,” Carrie exclaimed.

The bard looked embarrassed. He felt such an admission might sound feeble after his stern words about action.

“I’m going to revise some poems I’ve already written.”

“Well, why don’t you come back to Glenbristle when James goes to Glasgow?”

“Ach, you’d better stay where you are, Alan,” said James, who had been prepared for this development from long experience of the bard’s effect on women and their effect on him. He had always found much to deplore in these effects, but that voluntary donation had made for an unusual tolerance. “I’ll stay another night and catch the bus to Fort William on Saturday.”

“I think I ought to be going back to the Castle now,” said Carrie. “Will you both walk with me as far as Glenbogle?”

The Brotherhood was temporarily dissolved where the mouldering signpost hinted at Glenbristle and the garish new notice-board proclaimed NO CAMPING.

The two young men turned back along the rocky graes-grown road whence they had come. Mrs Chester Royde turned up Glenbogle in the direction of the Castle.

She had just entered the pine-darkened drive when she was passed by a lorry and saw to her astonishment that it was packed with young men and young women all shouting what sounded like abusive expressions at the tops of their voices.

“Ah, there you are, Mrs Royde,” her host shouted when she came into the Great Hall covered with targes and Lochaber axes, old muskets and stags’ heads and the portraits of the kilted chieftains of Hector’s race. “Have you heard about our bag?”

“No, did you have good sport?”

“Sixteen camping hikers. We’ve got the women locked up in the dungeon under the North Tower and the men, if you can call them men, safely stowed away in the dungeon under the Raven’s Tower—the one we call Mac ’ic Eachainn’s Cradle.”

Carrie turned to her husband, who was standing in front of a welcome evening fire in the great hooded hearth, a whisky and soda in his hand.

“Chester, is this a joke?”

“Joke?” he echoed enthusiastically. “No joke at all. Finest day’s sport I ever had. Carrie, this little old country of yours is some country. I’m crazy about the way they do things here.”