The Last of the Kintyres by Catherine Airlie

tow, whom she believed to be the family lawyer from Edinburgh. He had been there all day, his shining black top hat and morning coat conspicuous among the kilts and sombre homespuns of the local people, and now he remained for another hour after the rest had gone.
    When he, in his turn, left, Hew walked out to his car with him, his face more ste rn and set than Elizabeth remembered it, even on the journey to Lingay. Yet she felt that whatever had passed between them behind the door of the book-lined room had not exactly taken Hew by surprise. His look was one of acceptance and rigid determination as he retraced his steps to where she stood.
    “Has Tony come in?” he asked, glancing at his watch. “I expected him to get back before this.”
    “I’m sorry,” Elizabeth apologized. “It’s unforgivable of him. I haven’t seen him since we got back from the island.”
    He held the door of the library open.
    “I don’t suppose it need be a family conclave,” he said, standing aside to let her pass into the room. “There are just one or two points to clear up and now seems as good a time to do it as any. I shall be busy in the morning, at Whitefarland. The farm has to be sold.”
    Elizabeth knew that it had been a desperate sort of decision for him to make. His taut mouth and the look in his eyes were enough to tell her that, but she also knew that he did not want anyone’s sympathy. It was an expedient which might work to save Ardlamond, or at least to stave off the final disaster for a month or two.
    Unless, the thought nagged, he married money.
    “I’m sorry,” she said. “It must be difficult to come to such a decision when you’ve worked so hard.”
    He smiled wryly at the concise little statement.
    “Whitefarland might have been the solution to a great many things if I had been given more time,” he agreed, “but I can’t attempt to r u n both places. I shall have all my work cut out for me here.” He squared his shoulders in an' unconscious gesture of determination. “It’s difficult to explain about Ardlamond,” he added. “But I’ve got to hang on to it to the bitter end.”
    “I don’t find that difficult to understand,” she told him.
    He closed the door behind them and went to stand beside his father’s massive mahogany desk. There was a great mass of papers and documents scattered over it and all the drawers looked as if they had been turned out in search of something. Sir Ronald had evidently not been a methodical man, and Elizabeth saw, with a faint smile, that salmon flies and a great many old catalogues for this and that were mixed up with official-looking envelopes in the most haphazard fashion. The documents probably concerned the working of the estate, and it looked as if Hew had already encountered difficulty in tracing them.
    “This sort of paper work never appealed to my father,” he said, sorting through a sheaf of envelopes. “He was an outdoor man all his life and could never quite accept the importance of documents. They were thing s that should be made to wait, and he ‘filed’ them indiscriminately, one on top of the other, it would seem!” His mouth relaxed in a smile. “The system would appear to be to turn the pile over and start at the bottom, dealing with the ones that came in first!”
    The array before him looked formidable enough, and Elizabeth wondered if she could do anything to help him in this respect. After all, she had been three years a secretary and her late employer had been a stickler for method.
    Yet she could not thrust herself into his life. She still remembered with a deep sense of hurt that he had never wanted them to come to Ardlamond in the first place.
    Hew stood looking down at the papers for a long time without saying anything, waiting, perhaps, for Tony to put in an appearance, and she sat down in the chair he had pulled forward for her, wondering how long it was going to take him to tell her to go back to London.
    Thinking that she