“Well, I’ll admit that you were in a more difficult position with them. Still, though neither of them managed to hook you, it started a family row which has lasted ever since. So all I’m telling you is ‘watch your step.’ If you start trying to teach yon wee dark-eyed lassie how to pronounce Gaelic you’ll be in trouble with the other. And I don’t want to lose Sister Carrie’s voluntary donations. Besides, she may buy this property up here. She’s what the S.B.A. has been looking for.”

“Imphm!” the poet grunted in agreement.

“Imphm!” the lawyer echoed.

Then they lit their pipes and lay back on the grassy bank, staring at the cloudless sky. A quarter of an hour passed in silence, at the end of which time they sat up to look at a car go by in the direction of the Castle.

They did not hear Ben Nevis bellow, “Scottish Nationalists, by gad!” though the bellow was so loud that those inside the car might have been forgiven for supposing it was heard by the people in the streets of Inverness and Fort William, by the monks of Fort Augustus, by the patients in the Kingussie Sanatorium, and even a faint echo of it by the spinsters and the knitters in the sun on the marina at Oban.

However, the passing of the car stirred them to get up and walk back to their camp in Glenbristle.

“My god!” James exclaimed. “Somebody has gone off with the tents.”

Alan ran across to where his sleeping-bag was still lying upon the grass at the foot of the rocky escarpment.

“My poems are all right,” he shouted.

“What good are they?” James yelled back indignantly. “We can’t sleep under a blasted exercise-book.”

“We’d better take the rest of our stuff up to the cave right away,” Alan suggested, when his friend reached the scene of the raid.

“But who can have taken the tents?” James demanded.

The answer to that question was given not to the owners of the tents but to the guests of Ben Nevis assembled in the dining-room at the Castle, when at twenty minutes to two Catriona and Mary MacDonald, crimson in the face with the exertions they had made to be back in time for lunch at half-past one, came heftily in and before their father could tell them that they were ten minutes late, like two hunters flinging down the skins of the wild beasts they had slain, flung down on the floor beside him two little green tents.

“Found them in Glenbristle,” Catriona growled.

“We’d taken the bridle-path,” Mary growled.

“Wanted to see if we could put up a record in this dry weather,” Catriona explained.

“We should have done if we hadn’t spotted these tents,” said Mary. “But lugging them with us took the stuffing out of our final spurt.”

“Sorry we’re late for lunch, father,” Catriona growled.