Prisoner of Love (7 page)

She had walked for over a mile without seeing any sign of human habitation when, far up on the hillside, she saw the blue reek of peat smoke and smelled its scent after a while, borne on the wind. It was a smell that would always remind her of these first days at Dunraven, she thought
.

The hidden house up there among the pines would be the lodge where Julius hoped to bring his patients, but she could not attempt to reach it.
Julius had made it forbidden territory, much as he might have put it out of bounds to a schoolgirl.

Biting her lip, she tried not to feel annoyed by the fact, but the thought that she was not entirely free to please herself irked her.

A vague path that was no more than a sheep track wandered off at a tangent, and without thought, she began to follow it. All the way up among the pines the birdsong had delighted her, but here on the edge of the open moor, there was only the cry of the peewit, lonely and rather desolate under a cloudless sky.

But the moor itself held beauty. When she stumbled upon a hidden lochan it was aglow with yellow waterlilies, and heavy-headed reeds nodded in the breeze about its edge. There was color, too, in the bright pink stars of the bog pimpernel and the purple of small marsh orchids close beside the path. The ling was coming out and bees and a dozen species of butterfly were busy above it.

Then, high above her, a dark shape hovered into view. For a moment it seemed to come between her and the sun, shutting out all light, and then she saw it for what it was. A large bird of the hawk type—probably a kestrel—swerved and hovered above an unseen object on the ground. Its wingspan appeared to be tremendous, and suddenly there seemed to be nothing else on the moor but the unidentified plunderer and herself. Her heart began to hammer madly, although she knew that the bird was far too intent upon its prey to trouble her. It rose and swooped and there was a high, terrified squeak of surprise and fear as the unsuspecting victim was carried away.

Laura was too far away to discover what it was, but the incident had unnerved her and she turned abruptly to retrace her steps, only to find the path by which she had come guarded by two sleek gun dogs.

Behind them at some little distance walked a man with a third dog, which he appeared to be training.

“Down, Roy! Down!” he commanded as it sprang toward her. “Don’t worry,” he called when he saw that his command had been ignored. “He’s very young and this is no more than a friendly overture!”

The pup had reached Laura and almost knocked her down, but she was no longer afraid. She suffered the welcome for a second or two before echoing his master’s command.

“Down—good boy, down! We’re sufficiently introduced now, I think!” she said.

When she looked up the dog’s owner was no more than a yard away. At that first meeting she thought Zachray MacKeller small and almost insignificant looking, yet when she looked again she was instantly aware of his eyes. They were wide-set and very dark, with a depth to them like the pool beneath the Measach Falls that first day when she had stood there looking down into it with Julius by her side. They were the clear mirrors of a deep integrity, giving character and individuality to a face that might otherwise have been plain almost to the point of ugliness. The smile behind them was friendly and warm.

“I see you’re not in the least afraid,” he said, “although you had every right to be with Demon and Rauiri blocking your way!”

“I think they were just as surprised to see me as I was to see them,” Laura smiled. “One doesn’t expect company so far up on the moor. As a matter of fact,” she added, “I
was
rather afraid a little way back. A colossal bird came streaking down out of nowhere, and for a moment I imagined it was going to attack me, but it shot off with something else!”

“It would most likely to be a kestrel—or a hoodie crow!” He smiled, looking at her with frank curiosity in his eyes. “Where are you from?” The direct question could only be met with an answering candor on Laura’s part.

“Dunraven.” She glanced back down the glen. “I’ve come quite a considerable way.”

“Dunraven?” he repeated. “You mean the lodge, of course.”

Laura shook her head.

“No, I’ve walked all the way up from the shore. Perhaps I should introduce myself,” she added. “I’m Laura Behar. We are here on our honeymoon, but my husband has had to return to London on business.”

He stood looking at her, as if her explanation had left him bereft of words. It certainly seemed to have left him without his former friendliness.

“I see,” he said, at last. “I don’t suppose it will mean anything to you to tell you that I am Zachray MacKellar.”

“I’m afraid not,” Laura answered regretfully. “I know so little about you.”

“No,” he said, I dare say your husband forgot to mention that you had comparatively near neighbors at Garvie Lodge.”

Laura flushed, aware of a strong current of animosity flowing beneath the words. She had liked Zachray MacKellar on sight, had felt that he might be someone to be trusted, but if there was some sort of enmity between him and Julius they could not hope to be friends.

“Mrs. Finlayson mentioned that you lived quite near,” she told him, trying to keep her voice from sounding too stiff. “She worked for you at one time, I believe.”

“She nursed my mother until she died.” His mouth when she looked at him was a grim, straight line, but he did not add the information that Morag had also nursed Helene. “We were all very fond of Morag, but we could not afford to keep her. My sister, Cathie, manages the house—when she is indoors at all!” he added with a return of the quick smile that completely transformed his face. “I left her fishing the upper reaches of the burn when I came up here with the dogs,” he added. “Why not come down and meet her?”

Laura hesitated, and while she did so the decision was taken out of her hands. A shrill halloo echoed up from among the scattered birches along the burnside and a girl appeared in the grip of a salmon. Or so it appeared. She was a very small girl, short and dark, like her brother, with long flowing hair swept back from her face that Laura suspected should have been pinned neatly into a bun at the nape of her neck. But everything about Cathie MacKellar suggested a freedom only to be found on her native moors, and the salmon was clasped in her arms.

“It’s a forty-pounder, or my name’s not Murdo MacFee!” she cried before she became aware that her brother was not alone. “I gaffed the old devil by myself, too, seeing that you weren’t within hailing distance! Oh!
”

She broke off short and stared, as if the last person she would have expected to see anywhere on the moors was a girl Of her own age in faultlessly tailored tweeds with a town cut about them and her hands encased in hogskin gloves.

“Oh,” she repeated a trifle lamely, “I didn’t see you.”

“Apparently not,” her brother said, and then suddenly they were all laughing. Cathie had dropped the salmon on the rough grass at her feet to rub the scales from her hand so that they could be introduced.

“This is—Mrs. Behar, Cathie,” Zachray MacKellar said. “She has walked up from Dunraven.”

Automatically Laura found herself watching for the same look of shocked surprise in Cathie MacKellar’s eyes that had been in her brother’s, but instead she saw nothing but pity.

The shock was her own then. Why should Cathie feel sorry for her? “We had no idea that Julius had married again,” Cathie said quietly, the laughter gone from her face. “Of course, we haven’t seen Morag for quite a time. She went to Skye for a holiday in May and she hasn’t been up to Garvie since.”

“Morag has been kept very busy these past few weeks,” Laura heard herself saying. “We were married rather quickly in London. I—Julius didn’t think there was any need for a long engagement.”

She felt awkward, explaining her marriage away to these two strangers, but Cathie MacKellar was quick to help her over the brief embarrassment.

“Of course not,” she said almost lightly. “They’re not at all fashionable these days, are they?” She shot a quick, challenging look in her brother’s
direction which had compassion in it too. “Now that we have met, though,” she added, “I hope you will come to Garvie Lodge. It’s all rather rough and ready, you will find, but we will try to make you feel welcome. You see, there aren’t very many of us living up here. Some people would feel it terribly isolated, but it isn’t, really, if you have friends and lots of interests.”

“I could imagine that,” Laura said eagerly. “You farm, of course, which gives you a very big interest to be going on with.”

“You’d be surprised at all the other things we do!” Cathie grinned. “But come and see! Come any day, just whenever you feel you would like to.”

Zachray was putting the salmon in the game-bag slung across his shoulder.

“If this fish turns the scale at twenty, you’ll be lucky!” he challenged, turning to his sister. “You’ll have to get your weight arm tested, my gal!”

“It’s thirty if it’s an ounce!” Cathie argued. “Anyway, we ought really to hand it over to Mrs. Behar. It has been poached out of one of her burns!”

Laura did not know what to say or how Julius would have handled the situation. This delightful pair were as unconcerned about poaching a salmon as she would have been about picking the little white spears of true heather which she had seen budding on the high moorland half an hour ago before she had watched the kestrel swooping on its prey. They were entirely natural, yet they were in no way lacking in education or poise. This was their country, and at one time there had been no recognized boundary between Garvie Lodge and Dunraven.

Now, perhaps, things were different. She thought of Julius, wondering how he would react to the incident of the salmon, but she was certainly not going to take it back with her down the glen.

“There must be plenty in the rivers—burns!” she corrected herself.
“
And I’m all alone at Dunraven at present. Alone, that is, except for Mrs. Finlayson.”

“How is Morag?” Cathie asked, as they walked slowly back along the path with the dogs at their heels.

The question had eliminated Julius, Laura realized, but perhaps it was only imagination on her part to feel a sense of relief in the atmosphere once she had admitted to being alone.

“She seems very well, and she is always very busy. This morning we made raspberry jam.”

“They're Skye raspberries!” Cathie smiled. “Morag brought the canes with her when she first came because Helene was so fond of raspberries. Helene and I were friends, Mrs. Behar,” she added firmly as her brother dropped a pace or two behind. “It seemed the most natural thing.”

“I’m sure it was,” Laura answered, glad, suddenly, that Helene’s name had been brought into the open at last. “I gather that her death was—rather a tragedy.”

“It was that and more,” she said, her voice rising little above a whisper so that the man walking behind them could not possibly have heard. “It was an irretrievable loss for many of us. In some ways I feel that I shall never have another friend like Helene.”

Yet you must have known her for less than two years, Laura thought, because that had been the tragically short duration of Julius’s first marriage.

And Zachray? Why had Zachray MacKellar to be spared the mention of Helene’s name?

Then, quite suddenly, she was remembering what Julius had told her about his marriage. “We made a mistake. We were completely unsuited to one another,” he had said.

She walked the next few steps in a sort of stunned silence, unable to think clearly. What had gone wrong with Julius’s marriage, she wondered, and what had Helene really been like? Was the marriage over—destroyed by something subtle and inexplicable—long before Helene died?

Before they came to the end of the glen road another path, which she had evidently overlooked on her way up, led over the brow of the hill, and here the MacKellars paused to say goodbye.

“You’ll come to Garvie?” Cathie asked. “You made a promise!”

“Of course I’ll come,” Laura heard herself saying as Zachray turned to whistle for the dogs.

CHAPTER SIX

The following day a lengthy telegram arrived from Julius to say that he would be returning in the early afternoon with a guest.

Lance! Laura thought excitedly before she read on to discover that Julius was bringing the patient he had mentioned before he had left for London.

“The doctor has had this idea in his mind for a long time,” Morag said, busily preparing the guest room for their unexpected visitor. “I’m surprised, though, that he isn’t taking him straight to the lodge.”

“He must have changed his. mind,” Laura said. “He will have some special reason for bringing him here. This theory he has about the lodge isn’t entirely new. It’s more or less on the broad lines of occupational therapy, but my husband believes that certain cases benefit more by being treated as far away from their ordinary environment as possible. He thinks that the life at the lodge, which will be entirely self-supporting, can give a man back the true zest for living he may have lost in one way or another. And, of course, the patients wi
ll
be under his direct supervision.”

Morag said: “Yes, that is so,” a trifle uncertainly. Then she added: “Of course, he’s had patients up there before.”

The information came as a complete surprise to Laura. She was amazed that Julius had never mentioned the fact when they had been discussing his treatments, and almost against her will, she found herself asking: “Was—the first Mrs. Behar a patient at the lodge?”

“She was for a while, but then she came to Dunraven.”

And married Julius, Laura thought.

She spent the morning on the
machar,
wandering out as far as the headland across the fine sand that was a faint pink color in full sunlight.

She had come this way often in the past few days, watching innumerable seabirds feeding along the shore, recognizing no more than a few and wishing that Julius had been there to instruct her. The busy, red-shanked divers and the greedy cormorants delighted her, but far out on the skerries there were other birds and the dark, silky heads of seals she longed to see at close quarters.

Although the yacht still lay moored in the bay, Julius had never offered to take her out in it, but perhaps that was because they had not had time.

Out here on the headland time passed swiftly. When she glanced at her watch it was almost one o’clock and she began to hurry back toward the house, only to be confronted by the car coming swiftly down the hill road long before she had reached it.

She began to run, but of course, it was hopeless. Julius had driven over the causeway and across the bridge even before she had left the shore.

The car was pulled up before the front door when she climbed the narrow path from the rocks on the seaward side of the island, aware that she must be looking a trifle wind-blown and bedraggled. She had plunged rather recklessly across the sands, over weed-strewn pools between the rocks, and her shoes were stained with sea-water, but when she saw Julius waiting she ran toward him eagerly.

“Oh! I’m so glad you’re back,” she cried, holding up her face for his kiss. “It’s been—rather long.”

“Well, Laura!" he said. “You look almost guilty. Where have you been?”

Surprise held her silent for a moment. It was almost as if he had spoken to an erring child.

“I went along the shore. I’m sorry, Julius,” she apologized, “but I didn’t think you would get here quite so soon.”

She longed to put her head on his shoulder and feel his arms about her, but he drew back.

“We are not alone,” he said. “I’m sorry to have to bring Cameron here, but he hasn’t weathered the journey so well as I expected him to do. It will only be for a night or two.”

He turned, and Laura was aware for the first time of the man in the car.

She had seen Blair Cameron before—only weeks ago, or could it have been in another lifetime? His gaunt height seemed to dwarf Julius as they stood together in the first of the sunshine that suddenly found Dunraven’s shadowed walls, but it was the man’s direct gray eyes that she remembered so well. They were still the mirrors of a turmoil that racked his soul, although he smiled as he held out his hand.

“We’ve met,” he said, “by accident, Mrs. Behar. One afternoon, in Harley Street, a couple of months ago.”

She nodded, turning back to Julius, who had been looking at them in some surprise.

“
I was coming to see you, Julius,” she explained, “and I bumped into Doctor Cameron on your doorstep.”

As they moved towards the house she was struck by the desperate thinness of their guest. His bones seemed to be clothed in such a meager covering of flesh that they all but showed through, and the well-cut tweed jacket he wore sagged loosely across his shoulders. Whatever germ he had picked up abroad had taken its toll of nerves and flesh alike, but she knew that the lack of weight would only be a secondary consideration with Julius. It was the havoc wrought on his patient’s nervous system that was his main concern, and the peculiar, insidious mental deterioration that could take place when a brilliant man considered himself a failure.

That, too, was the work of the germ. Laura felt suddenly and vitally concerned about this guest of theirs, for Julius’s sake. She knew that he was about to try out some new theory of his own, having explored every other avenue to a cure without success, and she supposed that he was experimenting with Blair Cameron’s full consent.

Julius saw his patient up to his room and Laura was slipping into a bright cotton frock when he came back along the corridor.

He came behind her, kissing her first on the nape of the neck in the way that had now become familiar to her.

“What do you think of Cameron?” he asked unexpectedly.

She turned in the circle of his arms, fastening her belt.

“He looks very much in need of attention and—perhaps a miracle,” she decided.

He laughed at that rather abruptly.

“There are no ‘miracles’ in medical science, Laura,” he said. “Cures of that sort are left to the romantic novelists. What I want to do here is to prove to Cameron that life needn’t be finished with the ending of an idea
l.
Even if he isn’t likely ever to operate again, it doesn't mean that he can’t take up some other kind of work and become highly competent at it in time.”

“But if surgery was his life,” Laura objected, her eyes full of pity, “nothing else could ever be the same, Julius, could it?”

“Why not?” He asked the question sharply. “We can’t all have what we want from life—everything we want,” he amended.

“Yet, if he has given everything to his work—if nothing else really meant so much to him—”

"You are dramatizing the situation far beyond its merits,” he cut in, his smile faintly tolerant now. “It won’t concern you, of course.”

He drew her to him, his lips hot and demanding against her throat, his free hand in her hair.

“Laura,” he said thickly, “I believe I’ve missed you more than a little—”

She smiled, thrusting him from her.
“So you should! You interrupted our honeymoon to go off to London on business, and now you bring back a stranger to share the rest of it!” She gave him a swift kiss. “Tell me about Lance,” she demanded, suddenly aware that her hands were trembling as she tidied her hair. “Did you see him? Did he want to come back with you?”

“No,
”
he said, turning to change his jacket for a lighter one. “He was still in the Channel Islands with Holmes.”

“Which means that you had to manage at Harley Street by yourself?” she asked. “Julius, you should have let me come with you!
”

“I think not,” he said. “You were safe enough here.” He came to stand behind her where she sat on the dressing stool brushing her hair. “What have you been doing while I was away?” he asked.

“Not a great dea
l.
” She hesitated and then said determinedly; “I’ve made two acquaintances, though.”

Through the mirror she saw his face stiffen, the dark eyes narrowing as he watched her.

“They’re—old friends of yours, Julius,” she said, conscious of a new nervousness in his presence that increased her pulse beat and heightened the color in her cheeks. “Cathie and Zachray MacKellar.”

“They are our only neighbors,” he said with what seemed to be a forced indifference. “Apart from the lodge, of course. It was almost inevitable that you should have met them, I suppose,” he added. “They prowl about the district quite a lot, poaching salmon and shooting over the moor.”

“I liked Cathie,” Laura said defensively. “She was so completely natural, I thought.
”

He left the observation unanswered, turning away from the mirror so that she could no longer see his face.

“And Zachray?” he asked.

“He—seemed very nice, too. He had, as a matter of fact, been on the moor, but only to train a young dog to the gun.
”

“So!
”
he said.

It was the one small characteristic remark that reminded her that Julius was not wholly English. It held so much of reserve and conclusion, an opinion withheld, perhaps, for confirmation at a later date.

“I do hope we shall see more of the MacKellars, Julius,” Laura said as they prepared to go downstairs again. “If we are to be up here for any length of time in the future I’m sure Cathie MacKellar and I would get on very well together.”

“I have no doubt,” he remarked dryly. “Cathie has very few inhibitions. Did she tell you that she and Helene were the best of friends?”

In the dim light of the long corridor she could not see his expression clearly, but his tone had been light and unconcerned.

“Yes,” Laura said. “I think she felt Helene’s death very much, Julius.”

He made a queer, almost inarticulate sound in his throat, and immediately she felt sorry that she had made the observation. She did not want to hurt him unnecessarily by recalling the tragic past, but she could not think of anything to say now that would eliminate her error.

They found Blair Cameron waiting for them in the hal
l.
Now that the stains of travel had been washed away he did not look quite so desperately tired as he had done when he had first arrived, and when the meal was over Julius suggested that he might like to walk along the shore and “get some fresh air into his lungs.”

“Laura will take you,” he said unexpectedly. “Then, if you feel like it, we might go up and take a look at the lodge. I have several letters to send off before three o’clock,” he explained, turning in Laura’s direction. “I know you like a walk in the early afternoon, my dear.”

Laura was only too pleased to leave the house behind. For some reason it seemed to be stifling her because Julius had brought back with him an atmosphere of suspicion which she could not understand. She was glad, though, to be able to do anything to help him, and she was already deeply interested in this first patient of his.

Blair Cameron measured his long stride to hers as they set out. “All this will be entirely new to you, Doctor Cameron,” she suggested, looking up at his gaunt face and curiously indifferent eyes.

“On the contrary,” he said, “it’s home ground in many ways. I was born and brought up less than forty miles from here, as the crow flies.”

“The hoodie crow!” she laughed.
“I’ve
just heard of him. Only yesterday, in fact. I made his acquaintance while he was doing his dire work up on the moor, and I must confess he scared me. I had no idea he was quite so vicious, but I am assured that he is a regular bird of prey in these parts.”

“Were you alone?”

“At first. I met a—neighbor of ours later on and he told me it must either have been a hoodie or a kestrel I had seen. We haven’t many neighbors here,” she added almost lamely.

“No. That’s rather the point of it, isn’t it?” He looked at her searchingly for the first time. “It’s certainly the point of the lodge, at any rate,” he added.

“You’re our first patient,” she commented, picking the last of the sea-pinks as they went along. “Julius has great faith in this experiment, Doctor Cameron.”

“I believe so.” He still sounded unconvinced—or indifferent, perhaps. “I’m the initial guinea pig, as you say. I hope your husband isn’t going to be disappointed in me.”

Laura turned to face him. She had tucked the sea-pinks into her belt and she looked very young and, somehow, very gallant as she stood there with the wind filling out her cotton skirt and the sun touching the red-gold fire in her hair.

“It’s up to you to help,” she told him bluntly. “You can’t expect Julius to do it al
l.
We’ve all got to pull our weight, whether it’s in this sort of thing or something else. Unless you
hope
Julius is going to cure you, it won’t be any good, Doctor Cameron.”

He looked down at her and smiled, but not with indifference this time. “You know most of the answers, don’t you?” he said. “But I’m not a straightforward case.”

“I know that, too,” she said quickly. “But that’s what makes it imperative for us to succeed. You do want to—live, don’t you?” she challenged.

“I’m not so sure.” His mouth twisted in an ugly way. “You see, I have never been very tolerant of failures.”

“That’s absurd!” she protested. “You haven’t failed. Not in the way you mean. This has been an unfortunate business, I understand—something that could have happened to anyone. If Julius thinks he has a cure you must have faith in him.”

“How long have you lived up here?” he asked.

“Little more than a week. I feel,” she added, “that I have been here much longer, though, that I could stay here all my life, in fact. There is so much to learn.”

“Such as?” he queried, throwing her an odd glance.

“Oh—about the sea, for one thing! I’m longing for Julius to take me out among the islands.” She nodded toward the yacht sunning itself in the hidden bay ahead of them. “I want to be able to recognize all the different birds I’ve seen along the shore—the waders and the larger birds that fly out over the skerries. There are myriads of them, and they appear to be particularly unafraid.”

“They have very little fear of man in an isolated place like this,” he agreed. “Their only enemies are their own kind. Watch!” he commanded taking her lightly by the shoulders to turn her toward the sea. “Over there. That big bird with the enormous wing-span chasing the gull! He’s an Arctic skua, and the gull has something he wants. He’ll compel it to drop whatever it is—probably food—and he’ll be off with it before you’ve time to see what he’s about. It’s the same law, I’m afraid, as the law of the jungle,” he added dryly. “The big fellow always wins.”

Laura’s gaze was fixed on the contestants. The skua was far swifter than the gull and immeasurably more powerful. He swooped and attacked ruthlessly until the smaller bird was forced to capitulate. The gull dropped his prize with a raucous squawk of rage, but there was no real defiance left in him. As the skua swooped on the tid-bit he swerved and flew away. It was the same sort of thing as she had witnessed on the moor only the day before, and it left her curiously disturbed. She shivered.

They spent over an hour on the far side of the headland, and she was surprised at how much he knew about the flora of the shore and the marsh
land beyond. He knew, too, about the seabirds and the breeding places of the gray Atlantic seal. Out on the skerries, he told her, she might even find the snow-white pups of the common seal, which were born earlier than the gray ones.

Walking back, she knew that she had lifted him out of his Slough of Despond for an hour, at least. This return to the things of his youth had helped him put the present away, if only for a little while.

If it should prove to be only a temporary escape, it still could not do any harm. It might even help Julius find an avenue of interest to work along. Blair Cameron glanced at his watch.

“What time do we have to be back?” he asked. “Your husband said he would be writing till three o’clock, but it’s well after four now.”

“I shall have to remember the timelessness of the Highlands in future!” Laura laughed. “It’s so utterly restful here that one succumbs to it without thought.
”

He did not say that the afternoon had passed all too swiftly for him, too, but she thought that he had enjoyed their walk to the distant bay and might even like to repeat it. That, of course, would depend on Julius whether he wanted her to help or not.

Subconsciously she began to quicken her pace, aware of Julius standing behind the high balustrade of the bridge, as if he had been watching their progress for some time.

“Julius!” she called to him when they were within hailing distance. “We must really have a bell or something to recall me when I’ve forgotten what time it is! It would be invaluable to Mrs. Finlayson, at least. Have we kept you waiting for your tea?”

“I told Morag that you would be at least an hour when I saw you standing on the far side of the headland,” he said. “You managed to walk quite a considerable way.”

To see them on the stretch of sand beyond the headland, he would have had to climb high, Laura realized with a sudden chill feeling in her heart. He would at least have to be in the turret or walking on the board battlement surrounding it. There was a room up there with a desk in it and a powerful telescope.

Had Julius been spying on them? The idea was preposterous. Surely he would not stoop to such a thing! He had probably gone up to the turret room to write his letters. The sun flooded in there during the afternoon when it had deserted the larger study on the east side of the house.

“When you have had some tea,” Julius said, turning to his patient for the first time, “I’ll take you up to the lodge. I think you ought to see it right away. It may give you a better idea of what I am trying to do.”

“As you wish,” Blair Cameron said.

Morag brought in the teatray, placing it beside her chair.

“What time shall I be serving dinner?” she asked. “I have a fresh salmon to cook.”

Julius gave Laura a curious, one-sided smile.

“It sounds as if your friend MacKellar has been in the vicinity,” he remarked. “He has always had a peculiar habit of presenting me with my own fish. I find the Highland sense of humor rather odd at times. Perhaps you had better come to the lodge with us, Laura,” he added on reflection. “You may be interested.”

“I’d love to come,” Laura accepted eagerly. “It isn’t very far to walk.”

“So you have been there, also?” he asked, looking annoyed.

“No,” she protested. “I saw it from a distance yesterday when I went up the glen on to the moor.”

They finished their tea in silence and Julius went to bring the car around to the door.