“It’s not at all what I would be thinking anybody would do,” he said sceptically. Then he doffed his cap and gazed across to the Three Sisters of Glenbogle for counsel. “Well,” he said at last, turning to Carrie, “you’ve put me into a very difficult kind of a situation. I’ll just have to walk down to the Castle and receive my instructions. And I’ll have to ask you to stay where you are till I am after receiving them. Ben Nevis’s orders about campers are very strict. If he was to hear I had let a camper get the better of me, my place would be gone to-morrow. I’m sorry, mistress, to disconvenience you, but if you are a friend of Ben Nevis you’ll know the kind of man he is and understand I’m only doing my duty. I’ll leave my dog with you. There’ll be no harm in him if you stay where you are, but you’ll please understand it’s his business to see you don’t move from where you are.”

With these words the gaunt man said something in Gaelic to his dog and then strode off at a rapid pace along the path leading back to the Castle.

Carrie sat for ten minutes in a fume of indignation under the horribly steady glare of that milky pale-blue eye. The ancestral memories which should have illuminated with a sense of human continuity her present situation at the mercy of a tyrant forsook her. Then she tried to make friends with her gaoler, calling him ‘good old fellow’ and ‘nice old dog but no epithet tender or fulsome availed to clarify to the semblance of canine kindness that opaque, remorseless eye.

“Oh, well, I may as well eat my sandwiches,” she murmured to herself.

After she had munched away three or four she fancied she discerned a glimmer in that agate which eyed her and flung a sandwich to the dog. It did not even sniff it. It merely growled censoriously. Cerberus was more venal and his three heads less deterrent than this solitary milky wall-eye.

“I’d like to wring your neck, you darned coyote,” Carrie told him.

He settled his nose between his paws and growled a surly defiance.

It says something for Carrie’s devotion to an ideal that during the hour and a half which elapsed before the gaunt man came back she had worked through two long exercises in Gaelic Without Tears.

“I must apologize, Mistress Royde,” the keeper said, doffing his cap. “Mr Toker is after telling me that you’ll be looking for Uaimh na Laoigh. I’ll take you there myself.”

“What am I looking for?”

“Uaimh na laoigh. The Cave of the Calf.”