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Judith gasped. “You mean you and Graham decided?”

“Graham arranged the details, but I made the decisions.”

“And later on, Graham was going to join you!” Judith burst out, forgetting Barbara’s weak state.

“No. Graham is only a very good friend. He’s helped me a lot. I’ve been able to lunch or dine at his hotel sometimes and talk to him, and it’s made me feel more civilised.”

Judith rose from the bed. “How could you even bear to think about leaving Andy, who loves you so much and would do anything for you—?”

“Except leave Kylsaig.”

“And what about the children? Robbie and Susan would have been heartbroken.”

Barbara began to weep quietly. Judith stood for a moment looking down at her sister’s ravaged, tear-stained face. Then she knelt by the bed. “Darling, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound bullying. Don’t cry.”

“You don’t understand,” Barbara murmured. “It was the thought of Robbie and Susan that upset me. All the way in the train to Glasgow, I kept thinking of them. I thought about Andy, too, but children are more helpless. Judy, do try to understand. I’m trying to tell you that’s what brought me back. I couldn’t go through with it. I had to change at Glasgow, and I roamed about the station until the London train had gone. I wanted to come back, but I felt so ashamed.”

Judith put her arms around Barbara^ shaking body. “It’s over now, and you’re going to be well and strong again soon and really able to cope. Then perhaps Andy will agree to go back to the south.”

Barbara sighed. “Even if he does agree. I shall always feel that I’ve forced him to do what I wanted. I can see now it wasn’t the right way.”

The two girls were silent. Then Barbara said, “Judith, I haven’t told Andy all this. He doesn’t know what I intended. He thinks I was just in a very nervous state and went off on the train without really knowing what I was doing. So you must promise never to tell him.”

“Darling, wouldn’t it be better if you told him all the truth yourself?”

“No. I couldn’t bear that.”

“All right. I promise,” Judith answered reluctantly, for she considered it was unfair that Andy should not know the entire truth.

When Judith left Barbara and went downstairs, Andy and Stuart were talking in the yard.

She took cups of coffee out to them, said “Hallo” to Stuart and was about to enter the house again when Andy called.

“We’d better have your opinion, Judith. I’ve been talking things over with Stuart, about selling up and leaving here.”

“Leaving? Because of Barbara, you mean?”

“I don’t want to give up yet, but I’d rather do that than have Barbara unhappy or worrying herself into a serious illness.”

“I’ve told Andy I’m willing to offer him a fair price for the land and the croft and the sheep,” put in Stuart. “Or, if he can get a better price from another buyer, he’s free to do so.”

“Do
you
want Andy to sell out to you for a particular purpose?” she asked. “Is it part of your redevelopment scheme?”

“It makes no difference to any of my schemes,” he answered a trifle sharply. “I’m offering to buy only if Andy wants to sell. In due course I might want to re-sell, but whether I make a profit or loss is nobody’s business.”

“I think you should wait, Andy,” Judith said. “Don’t do anything on the spur of the moment.”

“But I’m thinking of Barbara—”

“So am I. If you sell now because she’s ill, she’ll reproach herself for the rest of her life that she forced you to leave Kylsaig.”

“But what’s the sense in forcing her to stay in a place 'she so actively dislikes?”

“Let her decide, then. Barbara knows that I’m willing to stay here all the summer. Give her the chance of proving that she has some stamina.”

Andy remained silent and Stuart said quietly, “Wouldn’t it be easier for you all if Andy gave up and went south? Barbara would probably recover more quickly and you could take up your own life again.”

Judith smiled. “It’s an odd thing, but nobody except my own family seems to want me to remain here. I wonder why?”

“That’s easy,” Andy put in quickly. “You’re a menace.”

“To whom?” she demanded, trying to keep her tone light, but aware of Stuart’s interest.

“Oh, to various established patterns—or some in the process of being formed.”

She collected the coffee cups. “Nobody on Kylsaig need worry that I shall upset their plans,” she said more tartly than she intended.

In the kitchen she was annoyed with herself for taking Andy’s teasing too literally. At the same time, she had been surprised that she had opposed him in selling out immediately. How could she be sure that Barbara really wanted to stay and accept the island’s challenge? Too close an examination of her own inner motives might prove that Judith was the one who wanted to cling to Kylsaig.

As Stuart passed the kitchen window he poked his head in.

“I’m working on the slipway. If it doesn’t upset anybody’s plans, I wouldn’t mind if you brought me a cooling drink in an hour or so.”

She laughed. “All right. Bread and cheese as well, if you’re lucky.”

As soon as she had taken Barbara a light meal on a tray and given Andy his lunch, she put some food and a bottle of beer in a basket and told Andy, “I promised Stuart I’d take him a bite of something and a drink.”

She turned away quickly, but not before she had seen the twinkle in Andy’s eyes and the hint of a smile on his face. She knew she was blushing and she marched out of the kitchen as quickly as possible.

She saw Stuart as soon as she passed the little clump of trees between Andy’s house and the shore. He was oddly, if sensibly, clad. He had discarded trousers and shirt and wore bathing trunks, gumboots and a peaked linen cap. He waved as she approached and called, “Careful where you step! Tar!”

She picked her way among the boulders and soft patches of bog and joined him on a stretch of rough grass.

“Thanks,” he murmured, as. he handed him the beer and bottle-opener. “It’s scorching work this morning.”

“Paddling in and out of the water ought to keep you cool,” she suggested.

“It might if all I was doing was just paddling, but heaving these chunks of rock about is mostly toil and sweat.” He took a bite from the meat pie she had brought. “M’m. Tasty. Your cooking?”

“Afraid so.”

“You needn’t be mock modest. Cookery was always a thorny subject between my mother and Granna. As long as meals came to the table decently cooked and served, Mother didn’t care, but Granna holds that a woman ought to know how to tell other women to cook or whatever’s to be done.”

“Your mother lives abroad, doesn’t she?”

“Yes. She married again about five or six years ago and her husband is an American diplomat, so they never stay in one country for more than a year or so at a time. She’s in Buenos Aires now and enjoying herself no end.” Judith was silent for a moment while he finished the pie and started on an apple.

“But you prefer to stay in Scotland?”

“I’ve no choice. My home is here. Even if my father were alive, there would still be plenty for me to do—or at least, see that it’s done by somebody else.”

“Why do you do all the work on this slipway, then? Couldn’t a couple of your men help you?”

He turned towards her, his hazel eyes glittering with laughter. “You don’t realise that I can’t have a couple of my own men any time I like just to play about with slipway schemes. Angus, my factor—you’d call him a steward in England—he manages the estate for me, but he’s the real boss. I pay, but he calls the tune.”

“Isn’t he interested in your ideas?”

“Oh, yes, as long as they don’t interfere with the men when he wants them for jobs. Actually, he’s quite content to see me come over to Kylsaig and play happily with stones and cement and tar, like a small boy. Keeps me safely out of the way.”

She thought that, in common with most men, Stuart thoroughly enjoyed acting the small boy playing with mud pies, and by now the new slipway was taking shape.

“You’ve made a lot of progress in a few days,” she commented.

He nodded. “I have to watch the tides. A week ago they were pretty low and I was able to tar the lower part. Cement’s no use there because it gets washed away before it sets. Higher up I can fill a lot of the cracks and spaces with cement, then tar over the top.”

He offered her a cigarette and lit both.

“If it’s still fine weather tomorrow, I’ll come and help you,” she said impulsively.

His momentary expression of pleasure was followed by a frown.

“No. The work’s too heavy.”

“I could stir the tar for you or mix the cement.”

He shook his head. “Cement weighs a ton and tar is messy stuff.”

She was going to offer to wear old clothes or borrow a jacket from Andy, but she stopped the words in time. He was definitely refusing her offers of help.

“If I’m here tomorrow, just bring me something to eat and drink, as you did today.”

“Certainly. I’m the compleat ministering angel,” she retorted, gathering basket, cloth and empty bottle. She wanted to sit and talk to him or watch him at work, if he would not let her help actively, but his dismissal was too plain for that.

“That’s a pretty dress you’re wearing,” he told her as she stood up. “Too elegant to be spoilt messing about down here.”

Judith’s thoughts were jumbled as she walked back to the house. All she had done was make a simple offer of help without expecting anything in return, other than a normal friendly “thank you,” but obviously one did not make such advances to the local “lord of the isles’ and she would take good care in future not to overstep this well-defined boundary.

In the evening she accompanied Andy and Robbie, with Kim, the sheepdog, on the nightly inspection of sheep. At this time of year, late June, the lambs were small enough to wriggle through holes in fences or hedges and become separated from their mothers. Young rams inquisitively thrust their heads through the wire and became hooked by their own horns until someone extricated them.

Tonight, after rescuing one bleating lamb from the wrong side of a stream and disentangling a number of others from fences, Judith could see another ram far down the field.

“That must be one of Neil’s” Andy said to her. “You might go down and set it free. We usually do this fence for Neil if we’re as far as this, and in return, if he’s this way, he releases ours.”

She set off down the long sloping field towards the ram caught by his curved horns on the wire. The frightened animal kept tugging backwards, nearly throttling himself in his attempts to get free.

“Keep still,” she murmured soothingly, straddled the ram and held him firmly between her knees while she lifted the strands of wire sufficiently for his head to be drawn backwards. With a final grunting bleat, he skipped off, long bell-rope tail swinging, to rejoin the flock.

She stood there watching, wasting a few moments in idle thought. Her knowledge of rural or farm life had been negligible until now. Of course she had noticed hedgerows quickening into life in spring and lambs dancing and bounding in the fields, but now she knew the sharp contrast between a lamb’s first soft, silky coat and the hard firm body beneath.

Whatever loneliness or isolation from sophisticated entertainments the winter might bring, she was now sharing the delight of a summer on Kylsaig.

“Hallo, there! All alone?”

Neil’s voice hailed her from the path where it emerged from a tangle of woodland.

“I came down to rescue one of your sheep,” Judith explained.

“Oh, thanks very much. They’re always getting stuck, like small boys with their heads between iron railings.”

“In that case, I believe, you turn them upside down— the small boys, I mean—and pull them out frontwards, so as not to wrench off their ears. I doubt if I could do that with a four-legged animal.”

Their laughter floated across the hills, and Neil’s dog, Jess, came bounding up to share the joke.

Judith walked with them down to the sandy shore behind Neil’s cottage. The sun was going down in a fiery red furnace behind the mainland hills, tinting the clouds in gaudy crimson and purple, and reducing the farther islands to stark, black two-dimensional shapes.

Suddenly Neil began to talk of his past, his broken career.

“Some of the people here think I came away to moulder here because there was a scandal, and in their minds a scandal is tied up either with money or women. As it happens, I didn’t embezzle the Christmas party fund or make passes at another man’s wife.”

“No, of course not.” Judith filled in the pause.

“I worked in a laboratory on chemical research—fuels chiefly—and I enjoyed it. Oh, certainly some of the routine work was boring, but we all put up with that because we were a small team and got on well together. The director of our section was a brilliant scientist and we felt we were making headway with the projects. My own personal life seemed rosy. I was engaged, and Christine and I were due to be married in a few months. Our combined parents approved, even gushed a bit, and Christine’s father was prepared to plank down quite heavily for a house, so that the mortgage wouldn’t be too much of a strain.” He broke off with a bitter laugh. “I might have known it was all too good to be quite true. A few weeks before our wedding date, Christine broke off our engagement. She’d met somebody else, she said. I suppose I’d been rather too sure of her. I’d never imagined anything like that could possibly happen. I pleaded with her—I crawled. I became utterly disgusted with myself—but I loved her.” His gaze was fixed on the horizon, but Judith knew he was not seeing the dove-grey misty islands out in the Atlantic, but the face of the girl who had meant so much to him.

She remained silent. It was for Neil to choose how much of the rest he would tell her.

Without prompting, he continued, “Finally she agreed to meet me once again, although she maintained there was nothing to be said or done that would make her change her mind about the other man. That day—I realise now that I should never have gone near the lab—but I tried to concentrate on the experiment we’d begun, although most of the time I was wondering what I could say to Christine, how I could persuade her to come back to me. I was sure she still loved me and it was only a temporary infatuation she felt for this other chap. Then, somehow, I must have been careless. There was an explosion—and Terry, my friend and the man who’d worked beside me for two years, was killed.”