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Chapter 1 - Tea-Party With Shona

 

It was a dullish afternoon in December, with Christmas still some days away, and Alison Campbell lay stretched out flat on her tummy on a narrow ledge of rock that overhung the River Clarig. Beneath her the dark peaty water eddied about the pool, making a lace edging of froth near the banks. Just like black coffee, she thought, with the foam for the cream. Making herself as small as possible and hardly daring to breathe, she peered intently down at the river — so close to her that by a little movement she could have touched it with her face.

Cautiously she edged a fraction closer, only to be pulled sharply back by a terrific tug on her ankle, and her brother Niall exclaimed softly, but no less impatiently on that account, “For goodness’ sake, Alison, be careful. If I hadn’t been hanging on to you just now you’d have been for it. Can you see him yet?”

She continued to stare into the gloomy, swirling depths of the pool. She knew there was a salmon there, for Niall had tried to point him out, but she shook her head. “I can’t see a thing.” A forked twig, bright with emerald moss, floated past just under her nose. The river looked impenetrably dark. “Not a thing.”

He made a clicking noise with his teeth. “Hold your hands out in front of you. That’ll make a sort of shadow on the water and it’ll be easier to spot him. You can see him wriggling a little with the current. Go on. I shan’t let you in,” he added, as with one hand she kept clutching the ragged shelf of the rock.

She did as he said, then exclaimed hopelessly, “I still don’t see anything that looks like a fish.”

“Hm! And you with the best eyesight in the family!” Without relaxing his hold on her, he crawled a little nearer to the edge and pointed. “See that stickey out branch in front of you — the one in line with the tree. And the tufty wee hummock in front of it. Well, the salmon’s in a dead line to the side. Gosh! Can’t you see him! He’s looking right at you.”

Realizing that this was a serious business for Niall, she smothered a giggle. The idea of a salmon lying on a ledge of rock gazing up through this thick browny water at her, struck her as being absurdly funny. Part of the laugh escaped in a kind of coughing noise, and Niall said crossly, “Oh, do shut up, Alison, you’ll frighten him away!”

She sobered up and blinked her eyes rapidly in her effort to see the fish, partly because Niall was so desperately anxious that she should and partly because you couldn’t expect a fourteen-year-old brother to let a thirteen-year-old sister tag along after him and share all his adventures, if you weren’t prepared to enter into things with the same keenness as he did.

But she must have been lying on this skiff of rock now for the best part of a quarter of an hour; she was terribly cramped; she was wondering how much longer she could bear Niall’s clamping grip of her ankles; and above all she was increasingly aware that the rock was not only very hard and very cold, but also wet. And last, but not least, she was wearing her best kilt. For she and Niall were on their way to a tea-party. And to arrive at Clarig House with a kilt that was sopping wet and badly crushed would be unpleasantly difficult to explain.

At this woeful stage in her thoughts there was the tiniest glint of yellow, wintry sunshine, and she gave an excited gasp. She could see the salmon. It was the slight swaying motion that Niall had spoken about which betrayed him. Just the merest flicker of whitey-greyness near the tail, and she could distinguish the dull blurred line of its body, the paleness about its head, and yet, though she could see it, it was so vague and indistinct that if she hadn’t been staring hard it would just have seemed a part of the background.

“Niall, I can see him,” she whispered. “Just over there where you said. A huge one too. About twenty pounds, do you think?”

“Sixteen anyway, I should say,” he replied, with almost as much satisfaction as if he had just hooked and landed the fish.

“Oh well, he’s safe from us to-day! I wonder if he knows, and that’s why he’s lying there so calmly.” She sighed. “That’s the worst of the Christmas hols. No fishing.”

He grinned. “Mm. If there were, I shouldn’t be wasting time on a silly tea-party this afternoon.” She turned again to the river, but somehow this time her eyes refused to focus on the salmon. There was just the brown peaty water, and not the glimmer of a shadow to be seen. She wrinkled her brows and bent lower down. “Funny — I can’t see him now.” Niall screwed up his face and stared at the rock where the salmon had lain, then made a little “Tchk!” of disgust. “He’s gone. I’m not surprised. All this chit-chat would frighten any fish.”

He loosed his vicious grip of her ankles, and pulling herself back from the rock she dragged herself to her feet. “I wasn’t the only one who was talking,” she reminded him. “Anyway, what does it matter? It’s not as if we could try and catch him. Golly, am I stiff! And my feet are all pins and needles where you were holding them.”

“Better pins and needles than a diving act into the Clarig!” He took out his penknife and, sitting on the bark of a fallen tree, began whittling a twig. She sat down beside him and he followed her gaze down the swift-running river. “He’s off for good. No use wondering where —”

“I wasn’t wondering that. I was just thinking it must be great for trout and salmon when the fishing season ends, and they can be as bold as they like and nobody will throw a line after them.”

“Much more fun, if you ask me, trying to dodge a hook and line.”

“I don’t call it fun having to fight for your life all the time.”

“ ‘Living dangerously’ is the phrase, dear sister,” he corrected her. “Adventure in other words.”

“Call it what you like, I wouldn’t enjoy it.”

He stopped whittling and looked at her. “Funny kid you are, Alis. You think you don’t enjoy it, but you do. You like exciting things happening just as much as I do.”

“Niall, I don’t. You know I don’t.”

“Listen! Don’t tell me you didn’t think it was fun that time with Guy in the summer, helping to track him down and playing at sleuths in Skye.”

She shivered. “Well, perhaps in a way it was fun,” she admitted. “At least it seems fun now when we talk about it, but I was scared at the time.”

“Well, naturally. I was scared stiff too.”

“Yes, Niall, but your way of feeling afraid was different from mine.” She didn’t know how to put into words her feeling that he positively leapt half-way to meet adventure and excitement. “You were enjoying it more than you were frightened.”

“Perhaps. Anyhow, it was a terrific bit of luck having a thing like that happen to us. Just think, if anyone we knew had someone staying with them who turned out to belong to a gang of international crooks, how we’d envy them. And if they helped to catch him — them — the crook I mean — well, I don’t want to brag about it, but Uncle and Hamish both said that he’d have got clean away if it hadn’t been for us.” He was now somewhat tied up in his sentence and he finished lamely, “Anyhow, we’d be wishing we’d had the chance instead of them.”

“I still don’t think I would. I don’t like these things when they happen to me.”

And yet as she said it she wondered if that were altogether true; and her thoughts sped back to the summer holidays which as usual she and Niall had spent at Clarig, which, since they had lost their parents when they were quite small, was their home. There were four of the young Campbells. Alison and Niall, Mary who was a medical student at Edinburgh University, and Hamish who was studying engineering in Glasgow; and they lived with their uncle, George Campbell, at the Cottage.

They all adored Clarig. Even apart from the thrills connected with Guy in the summer, there was always such a lot doing; though you might not have thought so, for Clarig was a tiny village on the west Sutherlandshire coast, miles away from anywhere. The Cottage itself was as good as on the beach. You walked out of the garden — or climbed the wall if you were a Campbell — and there you were on the sands. There was a couple of row boats moored in their own private anchorage, not to mention a motor boat which belonged exclusively to the young Campbells, and which was kept in the boathouse at Loch Clarig, a little way up the coast.

So it was natural that they could swim almost as well as they could walk, and if they weren’t swimming they were rowing, or climbing some of the surrounding hills, or fishing in the rivers and burns around the village, or golfing on the new course that Sir Angus Forbes had laid out in the Glen only this past year. But if there was one sport they liked better than any of the others, it was fishing. All the Campbells, including Mr. Campbell, were mad on fishing, and in a neighbourhood that was full of expert anglers, “we just had to learn to fish”, as Alison used to explain when strangers were surprised that her catches were hardly less good than her elder brothers’ and sister’s.

Mr. Campbell was a nice, reasonable kind of uncle. Perhaps it was because of their enthusiasm for all kinds of sport that he allowed them to do things that other parents or uncles might have jibbed at. He was rather an unusual person. When the family were away at school or Edinburgh or Glasgow, he lived alone at the Cottage with old Kirsty to look after him. He pottered about, visited his friends, and did some sketching occasionally, but there were certain periods when he went away on mysterious business — nobody knew where. But lately Alison and Niall had been told that these strange absences had to do with Secret Service work, what Mr. Campbell called Intelligence. It was all very hush-hush, and the Campbells knew that it was a subject which must not be mentioned outside the family.

When Mr. Campbell had told Alison and Niall in the summer that he wanted their help in connexion with Guy, they had heard a little more about his Intelligence work. The affair of Guy was one of those things you could never imagine happening to yourself. For Guy was a spy, and while pretending to be a friend of Hamish’s he had come to stay at the Cottage in order to find out certain facts which he intended to sell to a foreign government — though just exactly what those facts were Alison and Niall never discovered. However, their job had been to be in unofficial attendance on Guy when the older members of the family were not available. It hadn’t been easy to be watchful, and at the same time to convey the impression that they were simple and rather foolish children.

But it had all been frightfully exciting, especially because, as Niall had been reminding Alison, it was chiefly owing to what they had done that Guy was finally caught. Caught in the very act of escaping! That had been an adventure all right. But then during Guy’s stay something thrilling had happened nearly every day.

Alison scraped off some of the dead bark with her nails and thought of the time when, in the middle of the night, she and Niall had followed Guy on to the shore, dodging about the rocks in the vivid moonlight — always terrified that he would spot them. She thought of that day in Inverness when they were going to see him off at the station, and he gave them and Hamish and Mr. Murchison the minister the slip — completely. She thought of that other day when Mr. Murchison had fooled Guy by disguising himself as a rather smelly ploughman. And she also thought of that dripping wet night in Skye when in the dark and the mist she and Niall had followed Guy along the loch-side from Sligachan Hotel, and heard him, as they thought, make his getaway in a destroyer. Only it turned out not to be a destroyer. And he did not get away!

She hadn’t thought she had enjoyed any of these things at the time, and yet now, looking back, it was all terribly thrilling even to remember them. And suppose Niall had gone off after Guy on his own, if he had shut her off from all the importance and the fun — for it had been important and, she supposed, fun too — she would have felt distinctly out of things and would have hated it.

Worse still, if he had taken Shona with him — Shona Lessing the English niece of Sir Angus Forbes, Laird of Clarig and owner of most of the rivers and lochs and burns where the Campbells fished. Shona was good fun: the sort of girl who didn’t mind trying anything once, and she liked all the things the Campbells liked, only she didn’t mind breaking rules to get what she wanted.

Clarig wasn’t home to Shona as it was to the Campbells. It was only during the last two summers that she and her mother had come to Clarig House to stay with Shona’s uncle; and that they had come north to spend Christmas in Sutherlandshire was due partly to the Campbells, for they had told her how wonderful Clarig was at all seasons, and partly because Shona didn’t like to be left out of anything, so she had persuaded her mother to give up, for once, the English Christmas which she so much enjoyed.

Alison threw some pieces of bark into the river.

“Well, at any rate I’m glad Guy won’t be here to spoil these hols!”

Niall grunted non-committally. For a minute they sat there in silence. It was very still. Not a movement among the trees. It had rained over-night and the branches seemed to hang limp and sodden. The last brief flicker of sunshine had faded, and in its going had drained the landscape of its colour so that it was hushed and lifeless-looking. The dull gurgle of the water was so much a part of the background that you hardly heard it.

Niall pointed. There was a flutter of white in the grass and a rabbit crossed the path alongside in a series of staccato hops, then paused to munch at some long grass. On the other bank a blackbird was walking delicately on a wet, shiny rock. Alison could see its small beady eyes dart warily here and there. It stopped every now and then, cocking its head to one side. Niall broke the silence. “Funny little blighter. Listening for worms.” He put his knife in his pocket and stood up. “Suppose we’d better get a move on. Gosh, how I loathe tea-parties! Especially with Shona arguing about everything I say to her.”

Alison slid off the log. “I like Shona,” she said stoutly, “even if she does argue.” She turned and gazed down the glen. “The Cottage looks exactly like a Noah’s ark from here — look, Niall. With the sea behind it, it might almost be floating.”

He picked some fern from his coat. “Time we floated up the road, my girl. If you’re not, I’m famished. I hope they have some of that squashy chocolate cake for tea, the one they had in the summer with the thick icing and the cream.”

“I hope they do, and some of those marzipan biscuits.” She had risen and was following him along the muddy path when abruptly she stopped in her tracks and stared intently ahead of her.

“Come on, Alison. What are you staring at?”

“Up there — look. Don’t you see there’s somebody slithering down the face of that rock, the one with the heather on the top. Wait — he’s hidden by the bushes.” She pointed ahead slightly to the left. “Look now — a man in a burberry carrying something. I wonder who he can be.”

Niall, whose eyesight was not so good as his sister’s, gave an impatient little click of his tongue. “Don’t be so country-minded, Alis, trying to identify every single person you see. I expect it’s a gillie or a keeper, old Sandy or Donald very likely.”

She shook her head. “It isn’t Donald. Nor Sandy. Nor any of the Clarig men. They don’t dress like that. I expect it’s probably one of the guests from Clarig House.”

“Well, who cares,” said Niall, hiking on with purposeful strides.

“It doesn’t matter really, I suppose. He’s out of sight now too, but —”

“But what?”

“Oh, nothing. At least I know you’ll laugh, but he kept looking over his shoulder as if he thought somebody was following him.”

He let out a derisive hoot. “Following him! Over that knubbly crag? When there’s nothing but miles and miles of moor behind, and you might walk for hours and never meet a soul. Don’t be so young, Alison Campbell! I suppose it’s talking about Guy that has put you on to the tack of suspecting ordinary people to be hunted men.”

“I wasn’t suspecting anybody. I only said he kept looking over his shoulder.”

“And why shouldn’t the poor man look over his shoulder! Be sensible, Alis. There’s no chance of anybody like Guy visiting Clarig.” He grinned wickedly and added, “More’s the pity.”

“It would serve you right if something like Guy did happen,” she replied, as she squelched on a little ahead of him. So much rain had fallen in the night that the path was more like a stream than a solid place to walk on. Unconsciously she lagged a little. Niall prodded her gently in the back. “ ‘Will you walk a little faster, said a whiting to a snail. There’s a porpoise close behind us and he’s treading on my tail.’ ”

“You’re treading on my foot and you’ve spattered all my stockings.”

“And your coat’s all green where you were sprawling on the tree trunk. Picture of a lady going to a tea-party at Clarig House! All glamour and oomph — I don’t think.”

“You’re not so grand yourself with that splotch of mud on your cheek! Anyway, I shan’t be sitting in my coat, and Uncle’s got my slippers with him. I say, Niall, do you remember the first time we went to tea with Sir Angus — the day we were introduced to Shona, not knowing we had met her already at the Hill Loch?”

“At the Hill Loch, yes. When she was putting on her act as the village kid poaching.” He chuckled. “Though she didn’t forget to lord it the next day at Clarig House. Little blighter.”

By now they were well up the river path and almost at the bridge which crossed to the Clarig private grounds. The house was built on a raised eminence, so that from its windows there was a magnificent view of the glen and the river and the sea beyond. You could see the Cottage too, and the village with its little grey church, and the tiny pocket-handkerchief greens of the golf course.

Once over the bridge, the Campbells went through the sheltered walled garden from which not so long ago they had enjoyed feasts of strawberries and raspberries, but which was now, alas, in its state of winter emptiness. They skirted the shrubberies and a strip of lawn, and emerged on the wide gravelled avenue circling the front of the house, just as Mr. Campbell and Mary appeared from the thick dark avenue that curved down from the opposite direction. Also invited to the party, they had decided to come by the longer but drier road that led through the village and wound up by the moor.

Mary looked at her young sister in dismay. “Alison, you look a wreck! Where on earth have you been?”

“It’s that path down there. It’s running like a burn.”

“More than you two have been doing,” said Mr. Campbell. “You must have spent hours in the glen. Here are your slippers, Alison.” He laughed. “If it had been any other time of year I’d have said you were poaching.”

Niall grinned. “If it had been any other time of year, Uncle, we probably would have been.”

The next minute they were inside the big square hall which the Campbells knew so well, for when they were small Clarig had belonged to Alison’s godmother and they had gone there a lot. As usual the place was full of flowers. Great bowls of late chrysanthemums, some early hyacinths and daffodils, and garlands of holly and mistletoe, decorated the broad staircase. As she went to the cloak-room to change her shoes, Alison sniffed gently and thought to herself that if she were planked down here blindfold she would know immediately where she was because of the characteristic smell. A mixture of flowers and perfume and cigars, a nice, pleasant, luxurious sort of smell, she decided. No odour of food. Not like the Cottage where you knew what was for dinner the minute you opened the front door.

She was putting on her slippers leisurely when Mary, who was powdering her face at the mirror, turned. “Do hurry, Alis. Don’t sit dreaming there.”

Alison sniffed again. “I love the smell of this place, don’t you? I don’t mean the cloak-room. All cloak-rooms smell the same — soap and waterproofs and harris tweed jackets and coats and pipes. Don’t you think —”

“I think Uncle will be furious at being kept waiting so long in the hall. And don’t leave your shoes like that. Put them tidily underneath.”

Mary’s manners were inclined to be dignified and grown-up when she visited at Clarig House, and Alison knew better than to argue, so she followed her demurely across the hall and then went with her Uncle and Niall to the big square library. As Sir Angus came forward, with Shona and her mother close behind, it seemed to Alison that the room was full of people: mostly men, friends of Sir Angus who had come to Clarig for Christmas. They shook hands all round, then Shona grabbed Alison and led her to a chesterfield drawn up near the fire.

“Well! And aren’t you pleased to see me?” exclaimed Shona, curling her feet up and turning her back on the rest of the room.

Alison giggled at this very Shona-ish remark. “Of course. But as you’re the hostess, shouldn’t you be the one to say that to me?”

“Certainly not. I’ve come all the way from England specially —”

“Not specially to see me, surely?”

“Oh yes, but I have. Mummie didn’t want to come. She loathes Scotland in the winter and we had a lovely invitation to stay with friends in Cornwall, but you and Niall raved so much about what you did at Clarig in the Christmas hols, with the snow and everything, that I persuaded her to come here instead.”

“That was very nice of you, Shona,” still laughing a little.

“I think so too,” Shona said frankly. “Especially as I don’t see any of the snow you talked so much about, nor any frozen lochs where we can skate.”

“Well, naturally it doesn’t snow all the time,” Alison said meekly.

“I’ve brought my ski-ing things too. Which hills are the best?”

“Oh — the slopes at the far side of the Pudding Bowl,” Alison began vaguely, and wished she could signal an S.O.S. to Niall, who was sitting between Mrs. Lessing and one of Sir Angus’s guests. He was far better at dealing with Shona than she was. “There’s not much ski-ing here generally. The snow doesn’t lie very long, you see.” She floundered a little and added foolishly, “But it all depends on the weather.”

At which remark Shona let out a burst of scoffing laughter, so loud that Niall, hearing it, looked up and, noting Alison’s flushed cheeks, decided that it was time he went to her rescue. Besides, he enjoyed a battle with Shona better than listening to dull grown-up conversation. So he came over and perched himself on a low stool beside them. “Hello, water sprite, can I challenge you to a snowball fight?”

She looked at him scornfully. “Snow fight indeed. Bringing me all this way up here when there’s not an inch of snow to be seen.”

“Just because we’re so fond of you, Shona,” he said mockingly.

“Mm! If I had known! You said it was like Switzerland here in winter.”

“But so it is, Shona,” put in Alison, and Niall added under his breath, “Sometimes.”

“Well, it’s not like Switzerland to-day. It’s just like winter in England. By the way, I walked with Donald up to the Hill Loch this morning — where there’s a lot of pike now, unfortunately, and do you know what he told me?”

There was a wicked gleam in his eye. “ ‘A rod twelve feet long and a ring of wire, A winder and barrel will help the desire In killing a Pike!’ ”

“Oh really, Niall!” protested Alison, and in a superior tone Shona said, “Still quoting! How you do love to show off.”

“There’s nothing you can do about it,” said Alison, half in apology, half in sisterly pride. “Talking about fishing always sets him off.”

“ ‘Oh flesh, flesh how art thou fishified!’ ” he cut in swiftly.

“I suppose you made that up on the spur of the moment and think you’re clever.”

“My dear Shona, it hurts me to hear you. And it would certainly not please Mr. William Shakespeare if he could! But to get back to Donald — what valuable information was he giving you?”

“He says there hasn’t been a drop of snow this winter yet!”

“Nor will there be. Snow doesn’t fall in drops in Scotland whatever it may do on the other side of the border.”

“In spots then.”

He raised his eyebrows. “We usually have snowflakes here,” he reminded her with extreme politeness.

She made a face at him. “How I hate people who are always being clever and tripping other people up.”

“So do I,” said Alison. “Niall, do try being polite for a change.”

“I think you might at least say you’re sorry the weather isn’t what you said it would be. What on earth is there to do here in winter if it’s wet? You can’t fish.”

“Pity you’re not an eel and you might migrate,” said Niall. “They go off to what Uncle calls ‘brackish waters’ and mud.”

“I’m not in the least interested in what eels do, thank you. What about us?”

“There’s the Sunday school party the day after to-morrow,” said Alison. “Every year they get up a play or something. The kids dress up, and Mary and the Macleods (and me too, though I’m not much good at sewing) make the frocks.”

“Make the frocks for a Sunday school party!” exclaimed Shona with a horrified expression. “In the holidays! How too utterly boring!”

“But it isn’t, Shona. Not really. You’d like it. Wait till you see.”

“I shan’t like it.” Shona spoke with cold distinctness. “I hate sewing, and I am quite certain I should hate a Sunday school party.”

“And the Sunday school party would hate you too if you looked at them in that uppish fashion. Come off it, water sprite. It’s no end of fun really. Everybody goes. They had a piper last year. And a conjurer. And reels.”

“Oh,” she said in a slightly mollified tone. “Still, I don’t expect I’ll be there.”

“Perhaps you’d enjoy our party better,” said Alison. “We’re having it on Christmas Eve. The Macleods are giving one on New Year’s Eve and they’re sure to ask you to theirs too.”

Shona was a trifle off hand about these invitations. “That’ll be lovely, of course, but parties are in the evening. You still haven’t told me what we’re going to do during the day.” Fortunately her petulant tones were drowned in the booming of the tea gong, and when Mrs. Lessing beckoned to them Alison and Niall rose with undisguised relief.

Although the Campbells enjoyed Shona’s company, they recognized that she had had too much of her own way and had been spoiled both by her mother and her uncle, and consequently was apt to show annoyance when she did not get all she wanted, even when it was something like the weather, which was nobody’s fault. Alison felt that somehow Shona was blaming Niall and herself for the lack of frost and snow.

However, the sight of the magnificently arrayed dining-table made them forget Shona’s silliness. Plates were heaped high with different kinds of sandwiches, and there was only one plate of thinly cut bread and butter, which was placed in front of Sir Angus who, curiously as the Campbells thought, preferred it to anything else at tea-time. There were cakes galore. Some plain, some iced, some with fruit, some with cream — so many that Alison, trying to look round without appearing too greedy, was afraid she could not possibly get round them all.

“I’m starving,” said Shona as they sat down. “I hope you are too.”

Alison grinned. “You don’t have to ask that, do you? Niall and I always are.”

“I know. Thank goodness,” Shona said frankly. “Well, tuck in as hard as you can. You can eat nothing but cake if you want to.”

“I daren’t. Not with Mary opposite,” giggled Alison.

“She couldn’t say anything. Not at a party. And it wouldn’t matter after you’d eaten it.”

“Oh, wouldn’t it! You don’t know Mary!”

Shona laughed. She had quite recovered her good humour. That was one thing about her, reflected Alison, passing the sandwiches to her for the fifth time, she said what she thought but she never sulked.

“Who is that little fat man sitting next to Niall?” she asked.

Shona lowered her voice and made it very impressive. “That’s Professor Struthers. He’s up here because he’s interested in geology. You know — rocks and things. Sounds ghastly, doesn’t it! Uncle says he’s frightfully brainy. I think he’s distinctly funny. Not funny ha, ha; funny peculiar. Goes about talking to himself.”

“Niall seems to be getting on all right with him.”

“A dirty trick on Uncle’s part to put Niall next to him. But perhaps they’re talking about fishing.”

“I think I saw him when we were coming up by the Clarig this afternoon.”

“Yes, I expect you would. He just got in before you. He said he’d been down on the beach and had walked up the river bank.”

Alison opened her mouth to say, “Oh, but I don’t think he did. I saw him coming over the big racks from the moor.” But before she could speak Mrs. Lessing leaned forward from her place at the top of the table. “Alison, my dear, you must have a piece of this cake before it all disappears.” And she passed along the famous Clarig House cake, iced thickly with chocolate, decorated with nuts, and filled inside with a marvellous creamy mixture.

“I hope you’ll come back soon again,” said Mrs. Lessing as Alison and Niall said good-bye. “We have a new ping-pong table fitted up.”

Alison’s eyes gleamed. Both she and Niall loved ping-pong. But Shona interrupted. “But, Mummy, we’re going to do something much more exciting than just play ping-pong. There’s going to be a Sunday school party and I’m going down to the Cottage to help to make the fancy dresses. Another friend of Alison’s is going too — Sally Macleod.”

Her mother, who had persuaded Sir Angus to buy the new table for Shona’s benefit, gazed at her young daughter in amazement, and replied somewhat bleakly, “Very well, dear. That should be very nice.”

Shona rose up and down on tiptoe. “That’s okay then. Ten o’clock to-morrow morning, Alison?”

“Earlier, if you like. And don’t forget your thimble.”

As the Campbells made their way along the thick pine avenue, Alison turned to Niall. “I don’t think Mrs. Lessing was awfully thrilled to find that Shona wanted to come and sew instead of playing ping-pong.”

“She beats me, that kid! After making such a song and dance about not liking sewing.”

“I know. Suddenly to change round without any warning!”

Mr. Campbell and Mary, who were walking a little way ahead, turned round at this point and waited till they came up with them. “And what was my old friend the professor talking to you about, Niall ?”

Niall groaned. “He was exactly like a cyclopaedia. All about the conditions and formations of the earth having to do with vast changes in the past — or have I got it right? He blethered about periods of time and aqueous rocks. That sort of muck. Ghastly.”

“I should have thought all rocks round here were aqueous,” said Alison.

“I gathered from the snatches of conversation I heard that you were having heavy going,” laughed his uncle.

“I didn’t know he was a friend of yours, Uncle?” said Alison.

“To be truthful I wouldn’t have known him from Adam, but when I heard his name I remembered that I met him years and years ago when we once happened to be staying in the same house. I’ve never come across him since, but I remembered his name at once. He’s just back from a lecture tour in America, he was telling me.”

“Funny how he keeps giving his cheek three little dabs every now and again,” said Alison. “It fascinated me. I couldn’t help watching him.”

Niall grinned. “I felt like telling him to have a good scratch and be done with it.”

“A peculiar habit,” said Mr. Campbell. “I’ve been racking my brains to remember someone else I’ve known who has exactly the same trick.”

“But wouldn’t it be the professor?” queried Alison. “After all, you have met him before, and although you didn’t remember his face —”

“You remember what he did to his face!” Niall finished for her.

Mr. Campbell looked thoughtful. “It’s annoying, but I expect I shall remember later.”


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