The particular American whose oddity had been the occasion of this observation by the Glenbogle housekeeper had never felt less American than this morning when she was on the way to strengthen the mystical bonds of race that linked her to that attractive young poet. The acquisition of Knocknacolly had changed the outlook a good deal. It meant that for the next two or three years at any rate she and Chester would be coming over to Scotland regularly. It meant that Knocknacolly could become the centre from which the regenerative activities of the Scottish Brotherhood of Action might exercise a benign influence over the whole country. It meant, putting politics on one side, that she might become the patroness of Scottish art. The future was so full of promise that it was some time before Carrie realized what an awkward addition to a walk was provided by a folded tent. She was tempted to deposit it beside the bridle-path and leave it to Alan Macmillan to rescue if he felt inclined. Then she recalled her racial background. Ancestrally she had wandered barefoot along these slopes, her back bent beneath a creel of peats. Was she, a degenerate MacDonald of to-day, going to falter beneath the weight of a portable tent?

Carrie had been toiling along in laborious progress for about an hour when the repeated changes she had been making in the way she held the tent at last broke down Toker’s careful arrangement of it in a comparatively neat bundle, and the green canvas, after trying to wrap her up in itself, began to drag behind her in an unwieldy train. Once again the temptation to leave the tent beside the path assailed her, but she called upon the spirits of her ancestors and stooped to conquer.

Preoccupied with the task of trying to refold the tent, Carrie did not hear anybody approaching and was much startled when she heard a gruff voice say:

“No camping is allowed here.”

She swung round to see gazing at her over her shoulder a gaunt, unshaven, wall-eyed man in brown tweed with a powerful cromag and a gaunt, matted, wall-eyed retriever.

“I’m not camping,” said Carrie.

“No camping is allowed here,” the gaunt man repeated.

“But I’m not camping,” she insisted.

“No camping is allowed here,” the gaunt man repeated yet again, and as if vexed by the strain that was being put upon his master’s speech the wall-eyed dog gave a low growl.

Those who have tried to argue with a wall-eyed man, or for that matter with a wall-eyed dog, will recognize at once the disability under which Carrie laboured. So much does the wall-eye always dominate the other eye on such occasions that every remark is addressed to it, with the result that a despair of establishing rational intercourse asserts itself and one surrenders to the irrational.