“Wait a moment, Hugh. What about another jockendorrus?”

“Well, this really must be the last, Donald.”

“Go on, what did Trixie say?” asked Ben Nevis when he had refilled Kilwhillie’s glass.

“She seemed to think I had egged you on to shut up these hikers. She was very cross about it really. She said if that kind of thing happened again her pleasure in our friendship would be destroyed. I was a bit upset. So I’d rather not be brought into this drowning business if you don’t mind, Donald. Of course, so far as I’m concerned the more Scottish Nationalists you drown the better I should be pleased. But I’m very fond of Beatrice as you know. And I do think it might upset her if you drowned these fellows.”

“Well, of course, if you make it a personal matter, Hugh, I’m not going to do anything to upset you. After all there are other ways of dealing with Scottish Nationalists besides drowning them.”

“Quite, that’s what I feel.”

“One more jockendorrus?”

“No really, Donald. It’s bed for me.”

“Well, I suppose it’s bed for both of us. Don’t worry, Hugh. I’ll put things right with Trixie. It’s a pity women never appreciate loyalty.”

“Oh, I think Beatrice does, Donald, but she said there were times when she put common sense before loyalty.”

“Dreadful!” the Chieftain groaned. “Well, I’ll never understand women if I live to be a hundred.”

On this reflection the Twenty-third MacDonald of Ben Nevis switched on as he thought the electric light for the stairway but in point of fact plunged the Great Hall into darkness.

“I wish I’d never given way to Trixie about installing this damned electric-light at Glenbogle,” he exclaimed fretfully. “We were much better off with lamps. The beastly contraption never works properly.”

However, after clicking away for some moments he found the switch for the stairway, and the two lairds went off to bed.

While they had been discussing the future of Scottish Nationalists downstairs, the same topic had been started by Carrie Royde when she went along to her sister-in-law’s room for one of those little chats which women find such efficacious sleeping-draughts. Myrtle was already in bed, a great mahogany four-poster, on which Carrie in a pastel rose dressing-gown was sitting with her feet up and her back against one of the posts at the foot. The charming contrast of her red hair with the colour of her dressing-gown was slightly marred by the wallpaper on which life-size flamingoes, whose roseate plumes had been turned by the mists of Glenbogle into a revolting shade of washed-out magenta, were stalking about among greenish-yellow tuffets of boggy vegetation or arching their necks apparently to smell the butter-coloured water-lilies that were scattered about the marsh these antipathetic birds frequented.

“Myrtle, you heard what Ben Nevis said at dinner about Scottish Nationalists?”