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but he recoiled as if she had offered him some kind of insult. She should have known, of course. Neil was of the island, a native of Croma, and he would not take money from her for services rendered to a MacNeill. He felt honoured to be able to help her, although there was a look at the back of his vividly blue eyes which might have suggested pity. Pity and regret mingled, perhaps.
    “It is indeed good to see you home again, Miss MacNeill,” he told her in the soft Highland accent which made each word sound like a caress. “The island has been missing you these past three years.”
    The island. Not just her grandmother and the household at Erradale, but the island as a whole. The simple, generous people who still lived there and had served the MacNeills for five hundred years!
    The warmth of it, the utter magnificence of it, surged into her heart along with the painful acknowledgement that she was not equal to such a homecoming. She had come reluctantly, and she did not mean to stay.
    Emotion gripped her by the throat for a moment, shaking her, and then she saw an estate car being driven at considerable speed towards the pier.
    She had expected to be met, of course, either by Magnus with the old brake or by Duncan Mor, but this was something new. New and unexpected.
    The man who stepped from the estate car was known to her, however.
    “Rory!” Her voice held the fullness of her surprise as she held out her hand. “I had no idea you were here—back on the island!”
    “If you had written more often you would have known. Even if you had answered your grandmother’s letters with more alacrity! She believes in one letter, one reply—in that order—and I’ve been far too busy to write.”
    “But—you being here! That’s the surprise.” She had allowed him to take both her hands in his, and he held them longer than convention demanded, his dark eyes searching her face for what he wanted to see. “I thought you had gone—some weeks ago.”
    He shook his head and his eyes darkened as he released her and turned towards the brake. Of course, Christine thought remorsefully, she had said the wrong thing. She should have remembered how Rory had always felt about the island, how much the old Nicholson home at Ardtornish had meant to him.
    “I’m sorry,” she apologized with deep contrition in her voice. “But I heard that you had all gone—you and Jane and Hamish.”
    “You thought, in fact, that the island had been cleared of Nicholsons!” He turned smouldering, resentful eyes to hers. “Well, it hasn’t. Jane is in Edinburgh, but I am still here, and Hamish is still in London. Nothing very much has changed,” he added bitterly, “except the fact that Ardtornish doesn’t belong to us any more.” His dark face flushed angrily. “We have Hamish to thank for that,” he said. “It was his land, his birthright, and he sold it for—for whatever he finds to do in London!”
    The hand Christine laid on his arm trembled a little. “I know how you must feel, Rory,” she sympathized, “and I wish more than anything else that it needn’t have happened to you. The island has always been ours—MacNeills and Nicholsons living peacefully, side by side—and it was a shock to me to hear that Ardtornish had been sold. But we can’t blame Hamish,” she added firmly. “There were the debts—death duties and the heavy taxes he couldn’t afford.”
    Her cheeks burned as she mentioned Hamish Nicholson’s name. He was ten years her senior, the laird of Ardtornish and the most romantic figure of a man she had ever met. But not the laird of Ardtornish now! That had all gone, the glory and the splendour had been wrested from him by a harsh and unsympathetic fate, and he had remained in London, probably because he was too heartbroken to return.
    Yet she remembered him as arrogant and proud, always taking what he wanted without question. She remembered the way in which he had kissed her that first time, years ago, beside