When it was windy on Lochan Dhu the gale took your line out of the water at right angles and held it stiff as a telephone wire. When it was calm the midges made a meal of you while the trout came to the surface and openly laughed. But if trout fishing was not Grant’s idea of the perfect occupation, being gillie was obviously Patrick’s idea of heaven. There was nothing, from riding the black bull down at Dalmore to demanding threepence-worth of sweets from Mrs Mair at the post-office with the aid of a ha’penny and menaces, that Pat was not capable of. But the joy of messing about in a boat was still something that he could not provide for himself. The boat at the loch was padlocked.

So Grant set off up the sandy path through the dry heather, with Pat at his side and one pace in the rear like a gun dog on its best behaviour. And as he went he was conscious of his own reluctance and wondered at it.

Why should there be any qualification in his pleasure this morning, in his delight in going fishing? Brown trout might not be his idea of a sporting contest, but he was glad enough to be spending the day with a rod in his hand even if he caught nothing whatever. He was supremely glad to be out in the open, alive and at leisure, with the familiar spring of peaty turf under his feet, and the hills before him. Why the small unwillingness at the back of his mind? Why, instead of taking a boat out for the day on Lochan Dhu, did he want to hang round the farm?

They had walked for a mile before he had flushed the reason from the cover of his subconscious. He had wanted to stay at Clune today so that he could see the daily paper when it arrived.

He had wanted to find out about B Seven.

His conscious mind had dropped B Seven behind, with the tribulations of the journey and the memory of his humiliation. He had not consciously remembered him from the moment when he fell into bed on arrival until now, nearly twenty-four hours later. But B Seven was still with him, it would seem.

‘When does the daily paper arrive at Clune these days?’ he asked Pat, still silent and on his best behaviour one pace in the rear.

‘If it’s Johnny it comes at twelve, but if it’s Kenny it’s often near one before it comes.’ And Pat added, as if glad to have conversation introduced into the expeditionary routine, ‘Kenny stops to have a cup at Dalmore, east the road. He’s gone on the MacFadyean’s Kirsty.’

A world where the news of the nations’ clamour waited while Kenny had a cup from the MacFadyean’s Kirsty was a very pleasant one, Grant thought. In the days before radio it must have bordered on Paradise.

‘That guard the way to Paradise.’

The singing sands.

The beasts that talk,

The streams that stand,

The stones that walk,

The singing sand…

What had it stood for? Was it just a country of the mind?

Out here in the open, in this elemental land, it had an appropriateness that somehow lessened its strangeness. It was quite possible to believe this morning that there were places on this earth where stones might walk. Were there not places, known places, even in the Highlands where a man alone in the bright sunlight of a summer day could be invaded by the knowledge of unseen watchers, so that he was filled with a great fear and ran panic-stricken from the place? Yes, and without any previous interviews in Wimpole Street, either. In the ‘old’ places anything was possible. Even beasts that talked.

Where had B Seven got his idea of strangeness?

They launched the light boat from its wooden runway, and Grant pulled out into the loch and made for the windward end. It was much too bright, but there was a breath of air that might lift to a breeze strong enough to put a ripple on the surface. He watched Pat put his rod together and bend a fly on the line, and thought that if he could not have the felicity of possessing a son then a small red-headed cousin made a very good substitute.

‘Did you ever present a bouquet, Alan?’ asked Pat, busy with the fly. He called it ‘a bookey’.

‘Not that I can remember,’ Grant said carefully. ‘Why?’

‘They’re at me to present a bookey to a Viscountess that’s coming to open the Dalmore hall.’

‘Hall?’

‘That shed place at the cross-roads,’ Pat said bitterly. He was silent a moment, evidently mulling it over. ‘It’s an awful jessie-like thing to present a bookey.’

Grant, bound in duty to the absent Laura, searched his mind. ‘It’s a great honour,’ he said.

‘Then let The Child have the honour.’

‘She is a little young yet for such responsibility.’

‘Well, if she’s too young for such responsibility I’m too old for such capers. So they’ll have to get some other family to do it. It’s all havers anyway. The hall’s been open for months.’

To this disillusioned contempt for adult pretence Grant had no answer.

They fished turn-about, in a fine male amity; Grant flicking his line with a lazy indifference, Pat with the incurable optimism of his kind. By noon they had drifted back to a point level with the little jetty, and they turned in-shore to make tea on the primus in the little bothy. As Grant was paddling the last few yards he saw Pat’s eye fixed on something along the shore, and turned to see what occasioned such marked distaste.