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lulled her into a good temper again. She was undecided whether to make another attempt to conquer Kylsaig. Shading her eyes, she looked along the grassy path and saw a man coming towards her. Too tall for Andy, unaccompanied by a dog as Neil would be, perhaps some other holidaymaker trying to find a way round the island.
    But the figure waved his stick and she saw then that Stuart Huntly was hurrying towards her.
    “Barbara said I might find you somewhere on the island’s outer edge,” he greeted her.
    “I wanted to make the circular trip, but I’ve failed again,” she admitted. “I’m certainly no Robinson Crusoe!”
    Stuart leaned against the stone wall, his hazel eyes full of laughter. Judith’s practised eye for fabrics noted the soft fine tweed of his jacket and trousers, his cream silk shirt, and regretted her own appearance after negotiating two sets of barbed wire.
    “I borrowed a pair of Barbara’s denims,” she murmured, “and one of her oldest shirts. Your island is rough on clothes, and I haven’t improved these.” She glanced ruefully at a small tear in the knee of the trousers. “By the way, I’m sorry I’ve eaten all the food I brought with me.”
    “Your sister gave me coffee and scones. What’s your programme now?”
    She frowned. “I’m not sure. I’d like to do what I set out to do. It’s a sort of challenge—if you could give me directions, perhaps?”
    “Better-than that, I’ll come with you—if I may?”
    “Of course.” Unaccountably she was blushing. “But I don’t want to upset any of your own plans.”
    “You won’t. If you’re ready, we’ll see if we can close the Kylsaig Gap and put a girdle round the island— though not in forty minutes.”
    After the easy first part, the paths became rougher, and she was glad of his firm hand to help her across a boulder-strewn clearing at the edge of a wood and then across' another sizeable burn.
    “I wouldn’t have had the courage to jump that alone,” she confessed.
    He led her through a grassy tangle behind yet another ruined croft and finally they came out on a well-defined sheep track high above the shore. Away to the right below, she could see the old ruined pier.
    “Oh, now I know where I am,” she said. “But you’ve cheated. You didn’t really go round the edge. You cut off a corner.”
    “True, but unless you wanted to go into bogs up to your knees, the way we came was the only one.” He turned to look her full in the face. “And, if I’m not mistaken, you also cheated this morning. I doubt if you hugged the shore from Barbara’s up to the place where I found you. You cut across just above the ferry.”
    She grinned guiltily. “Yes, I forgot that. Well, thank you, anyway. I should never have found my way here.”
    “The island doesn’t yield up all its secrets to all comers. Kylsaig likes to reveal itself a little at a time.”
    “But I thought you were hoping to develop the island, make it more prosperous,” she pointed out. “How can it be attractive if people can’t find their way about?”
    “I do want to make Kylsaig a pleasant little place, attractive to just a few of the right kind of tourists—and the right kind are those who don’t want concrete ribbon roads stretching in front of them, but are willing to take whatever may turn up in their wanderings.”
    She was stung by his rebuke. “Nobody expects Kylsaig to be paved,” she snapped.
    “Don’t be indignant because you couldn’t find your own way.” He smiled at her, but his eyes were mocking. “Also, I want Kylsaig to be attractive to the inhabitants so that they can go on living here and find enough work of one sort or another. The young ones drift away and the old ones die off. Take young Donald Fraser, the ferryman’s eldest boy. You saw him on Saturday running the ferryboat, and he does it very well. He has a fancy for engineering, but what kind of job is he going to find here? He’s nearly sixteen. In a few weeks he’ll