As in most Scottish shooting-lodges the rooms at Knocknacolly tried to make up with quantity for their lack of size and absence of any kind of architectural proportion. The kitchen-quarters were designed to pay out the domestic staff for all the waste and breakages and bad meals of the rest of the year, by making the annual migration to Scotland the equivalent of two months’ hard labour in the days before prison reform. But why continue? It is more cheerful to hear Chester Royde assert that Knocknacolly Lodge will want a hell of a lot doing to it inside and out before it remotely resembles anything he calls a house. The mouldering blinds, the dry rot in the attics, the corrugated-iron bothy built along one side, the kennels with their rusty railings, the dead bluebottles on the window-sills, the dead tortoiseshell butterflies on the floors—one knows that all these will vanish if Chester Royde decides to buy Knocknacolly.

But will he?

“I would just adore this place, Chester,” said his wife.

“I knew you’d like it. I am so glad,” Ben Nevis barked. “And as I say it’s the best twelve-head forest in Inverness-shire.”

Kilwhillie said nothing. He just let his moustache nuzzle his hand and comforted himself with its dumb sympathy.

“How much are you asking for it, Kilwhillie?” Chester Royde snapped suddenly.

“Fifteen thousand pounds,” Ben Nevis replied for his friend.

“I’ll give you six thousand pounds, Kilwhillie,” Chester Royde said in a voice as hard as the rock of Manhattan.

“I’d hoped to get at least seven thousand,” Kilwhillie murmured.

“That’s O.K. by me. I’ll give seven thousand,” Chester Royde snapped. “Do you accept that offer?”

“Why, yes, I’ll accept that.”

After all he had always told himself he would take seven thousand for Knocknacolly, and he had taken it.

“You’ve got a bargain, Royde,” Ben Nevis said. “You wouldn’t have had Knocknacolly from me for seven thousand.”

“No, I guess I wouldn’t,” Chester Royde agreed, with a contented smile.

Chapter 8

GLENBRISTLE

THE REFLECTIONS OF Miss Myrtle Royde when she set out that morning to Glenbristle were very different from those of her sister-in-law the previous morning. Carrie had been animated by a dreamy interest in the past; Myrtle was inspired entirely by a lively curiosity about the present. She found her sister-in-law’s Scottish origin an inadequate explanation of her so evident anxiety about the welfare of these young men she had met, and she was looking forward to ascertaining for herself just how attractive this poet was. With the advantage of three years’ sophisticated juniority she was tolerantly amused by Carrie’s naïvety in supposing she had covered her tracks by addressing the letter to the lawyer.