Chester Royde looked thoughtful. He was wondering if he could get his kilt in time for what sounded like an appropriate occasion for the début of that costume.

About four miles after Kenspeckle the bastions of Glenbore came into sight, and the Daimler turned off from the main road to make up Glenbore a journey similar to the one it had already made down Glenbogle. Kilwhillie had parted some time ago now with most of Glenbore to a rich stockbroker called Dutton, who had pulled down the old Glenbore Lodge and built himself a concrete palace designed by an architect of the modern school. It looked like a frozen cheese lying about in a rockery, and was considered unsuitable to Inverness-shire. So it was, but not more unsuitable than some of the new bridges put up by the Inverness-shire County Council.

“Ghastly-looking place, what?” Ben Nevis said as they passed the new Glenbore Lodge. “Gives me the creeps whenever I see it.”

Kilwhillie was reflecting that the prospective purchaser of Knocknacolly might share Dutton’s taste in architecture and therefore refrained from savage criticism.

“Every man to his own taste where a house is concerned,” he observed tolerantly.

“I don’t agree with you at all, Hugh,” Ben Nevis argued. “Nobody has a right to defile one of our glorious Highland glens with a building like that.”

“What I object to much more than his house is his calling himself Dutton of Glenbore,” said Kilwhillie. “Glenbore was part of Kilwhillie till I sold it and I think it’s rather bad form calling himself Glenbore.”

“So if I buy Knocknacolly,” Chester Royde asked, “I wouldn’t be called Knocknacolly?”

Kilwhillie was in a painful quandary. He did not want to risk losing a purchaser for Knocknacolly by denying him the right to use it as a name. At the same time he did feel very strongly about these rich fellows who bought sporting estates in the Highlands and supposed that by doing so they could turn themselves into lairds of long lineage and ancient territorial privileges. He had an equal objection to lairds of long lineage who put a ‘The’ in front of Macintosh or Macleod or Macneil, always excepting The Chisholm. Kilwhillie in fact was a stickler for tradition, and it says much for his sincerity that he preferred to risk losing a purchaser than to mislead him by letting him suppose that if he bought Knocknacolly he would be justified in expecting to be addressed as Knocknacolly.

“Well, I dare say some people would call you Knocknacolly if they thought you liked it,” said Kilwhillie. “But I could not undertake to call you Knocknacolly myself.”

“What do you want to call yourself Knocknacolly for, Chester?” his wife asked. “There’s no point in you calling yourself Knocknacolly.”