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Islands, anyway, and this one could only have been brought in for its master’s pleasure. It was an obvious thoroughbred, and she tried not to remember how well and how naturally the man had sat in the saddle, as if horse and rider were really one.
    “It was not my intention that we should meet,” she told him with icy deliberation, standing squarely in his path to block his way to the house.
    “So it would seem.” He looked down at her, half amused, half puzzled by her reception of him, so that the flush deepened in her cheeks. “Why didn’t you tell me that you lived here when we met on the boat?” he asked. “It would have been only, courteous, to say the least of it.”
    “At first,” she returned briefly, “I could not imagine that it concerned either of us where the other lived. I had no idea that you had bought the Nicholsons’ home and were hoping to buy mine.”
    He looked grave for a moment, the green eyes narrowing.
    “I was honest enough about it,” he reminded her. “Or, at least, I thought I was being honest. You did not tell me that you were bound for Croma and I didn’t think to ask. You seemed to me to. belong to the Islands as a whole, not to one particular island.”
    “But now you know,” she said, “that I belong on Croma, that, whatever happens, this is my home.”
    Her final decision about staying on Croma had been instantaneous. This man had made it a challenge. She could not allow him to defeat her, not when he had already defeated the Nicholsons.
    She supposed that he was on his way to visit her grandmother with just that end in view, with his cheque- book in his pocket, no doubt, and it would give her the greatest pleasure in the world to stop him.
    “I don’t suppose for one moment that you have come to pay a social call, Mr.—”
    “Why not?” he queried. “And the name, by the way, is Sutherland—Finlay Sutherland.” He made her an odd little bow, half mocking, half amused. “I expect you already know that, though. You seem to have gone into my credentials pretty thoroughly since we last met.”
    “I know about you,” she agreed, her lips quivering because, in some odd way, he seemed to have gained the upper hand of the situation without a great deal of trouble. She had felt it to be wholly in her favour, but now she was not so sure. “I know that you have offered my grandmother a tempting sum for Erradale,” she rushed on hotly, “but I can save you a journey. We are not going to sell, Mr. Sutherland. We never had any intention of selling. Erradale is our home.”
    He said, with faint amusement in his voice:
    “You consider me the complete ogre, don’t you? Not even the fact that Erradale was put tentatively on the market is an extenuating circumstance, I gather?”
    “No,” she told him bluntly. “Nothing could excuse your new-world brashness, Mr. Sutherland. The fact that my grandmother was—in strained circumstances could only have been known to a very few people locally, so that I can’t even begin to guess how you came to hear about it. But I can give you our answer, and I am trying to do just that.”
    She took hold of the great iron gate and would have attempted to close it between them, but it had been so long in disuse that it refused to move. Embedded in the weeds and gravel at the edge of the drive, it had probably not been closed for years. Few callers had ever been barred from Erradale, until now.
    Finlay Sutherland smiled as he rested a hand on the reluctant gate.
    “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not going to force my way in. For your information, though, I hadn’t come up here post-haste, with my cheque-book in my hand.” His smile deepened. “It was something of a social call, as a matter of fact,” he added wryly, “but now I guess I know where we stand.”
    Christine felt suddenly nonplussed and almost guilty as she looked back into the green eyes. They held disappointment and a certain desire for retaliation, yet she knew