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that he considered the incident closed. He continued to look at her for a moment longer before he turned back towards his mount, whose sensitive ears were suddenly pricked at the approach of a stranger.
    Someone was coming swiftly towards them from the direction of the house, a tall, fair man in a dark kilt with an air of power and conquest about him which belied the fact that he was the dispossessed laird of Ardtornish.
    “Hamish!” Christine cried, and all her relief and surprise were in her voice. “Where have you come from?”
    Hamish Nicholson gave her companion the briefest of glances as he took both her trembling hands in his.
    “From your ancestral stronghold, Fair Lady!” he answered. “I’ve just come in with the mail to wish you a happy birthday—when it comes!”
    Christine did not know how to answer him. The shock of his return, the utter unexpectedness of seeing him there in that moment, made words impossible. She could only stare at him and marvel while her heart beat suffocatingly close against her throat and the old fascination held her in thrall again.
    Hamish looked magnificent standing there with the rugged background of the hills behind him and the wind in his hair! It had always been like this, as far back as she could remember, although Hamish had never looked like this nor spoken to her in quite this way before. He had teased her and laughed at her seriousness, but in so many ways he had always been just beyond her reach. The years which separated them in age had done nothing to help her to forget him, but now they did not seem nearly so formidable a barrier as they had done in the past. The gulf between twenty and thirty was not nearly so deep as the chasm which had yawned at her feet when she had been sixteen and he twenty-six, and the past two years had helped her.
    Swiftly she wondered if she had begged to go to Paris with the hope in her heart that she might meet Hamish there or even run into him in London when she returned as a more sophisticated product of the world in which he moved. But, strangely enough, here they were meeting on the old, familiar ground, meeting at last on Croma, where they both belonged!
    “You must have had a special invitation!” she laughed. “The official ones are not out yet.”
    “I believe I invited myself,” he admitted shamelessly, his vivid blue eyes lingering with some surprise on her tawny hair. “I found myself in Edinburgh, on business, and Croma was not so far away.”
    Had he come to Edinburgh to sign away his land, finally and irrevocably? She turned, remembering Finlay Sutherland for the first time, aware that Hamish would not know who he was and desperately embarrassed at. the thought of having to introduce them.
    The Canadian had gone, however. While she had been swept back into the past, while she had greeted Hamish with every pulse in her body beating madly in response to an old infatuation, the new laird of Ardtornish had mounted his horse and rode away.
    “He’s gone!” she exclaimed, and Hamish looked at her with the one-sided smile that was part of his charm and asked:
    “Does it matter so much? You see, I have a fairly good idea who he is.”
    All her sympathy, all the resentment she felt against the fate which had left him so cruelly dispossessed, welled up to express itself in eager words.
    “I’m so sorry, Hamish!” she apologized. “Sorry that this had to happen on your first day on Croma. And I’m glad that I didn’t have to introduce you to Finlay Sutherland.”
    He shrugged indifferently.
    “You needn’t have worried,” he told her. “I shall have to meet him some time or other. One can’t live on an island as small as Croma and not come up against—one’s neighbours.”
    “Then—you’re going to stay?” Her heartbeats quickened and her grey eyes shone. “Are you, Hamish? Are you really going to stay?”
    He smiled at her.
    “For the time being,” he agreed, looking about him with an expectant gleam in