Highland Mist by Rose Burghley

friendly, and avoid all unnecessary formality.”
    Euan ignored her.
    “ Would you, Toni?” he repeated.
    “Oh, yes,” she answered rather breathlessly. “I would.”
    “Even if Mr. Henderson refuses to face the rigours of that part of the world again?”
    “He won’t,” Celia said confidently. “I’ll see to that. And—perhaps Toni!” she added, with a gleaming, amused glance at her daughter.
    MacLeod seemed to tighten his lips.
    “Then we’ll draw up an agreement—or my solicitor can do so—and I’ll put in some active servants in Inverada, and at least stop up a few rat-holes before you arrive.” Celia shuddered theatrically. “The place, as you’ll remember, is overlooking a loch, and it’s been damp for years. Dampness and rats go together.”
    Celia’s eyes grew wide and alarmed as a child’s.
    “How fortunate we’ve got to know you,” she said. “The first hint of a rat and Charles would have refused to do a thing. But you’re so extraordinarily helpful.” Her eyes seemed to caress him. “Toni has already found that out. She might not be here but for you, Euan...”
    He turned a little impatient.
    “We mustn’t dramatise your daughter’s stay in my cottage,” he said curtly. “She caught a chill, and I nipped it in the bud. I’d have done the same for anyone.”
    “Of course,” Celia said soothingly. “I understand that perfectly.”

 
    CHAPTER NINE
    It was several weeks later that Toni saw Inverada—or the road which led to it—for the second time, and by that time it was spring and she hardly recognised anything she saw.
    Celia was with her, and she grew quite enthusiastic because the green of the woods was so new and delicate—more like a tender film clothing the bare branches—and every hurrying stream gave off a babbling sound, as if eager to be on its way, and hard-pressed because the melting snows in the mountains were coming down much too fast. Toni had never seen such clear water, although it was also brown as a ribbon as it wound its way round boulders and clove a way through the rocky countryside.
    So many rocks, so many boulders ... such turbulence in a quiet way. The fever of spring was in every leaping cascade and every triumphant spurt of green. Toni tried to picture the same scene blanketed in snow, and her imagination—or rather, her memory—failed her utterly. The resinous smell that floated on the wind, the stir of innumerable feathered things, the silver fish gleaming in the shallows, made memory an uncertain thing. She began to wonder whether indeed she ever had been here before, and the serene lochs before her eyes, the brown summits of the mountains rising all around, were features of a landscape that she had never visited before.
    Celia was so delighted with everything that she quite failed to appreciate how very different it had been in early February. What a very different welcome from these remote Highlands Toni and Charles had received.
    “I told you it was always wonderful staying with Uncle Angus,” she enthused. “It’s true I never stayed with him in the winter, but I can remember autumn gales and large fires, and that sort of thing. I do hope Euan—” by this time, as a result of much correspondence, it was always ‘Euan’—“has got some good fires going for us, and that one at least of those new servants of his is a good cook. I simply can’t stand bad cooking.”
    Then she let out a little exclamation—the delighted exclamation of a young girl.
    “Oh, look! I can see the house at last, looking right out across the small loch. It’s a superb situation, with the woods behind it and the water in front. On a fine morning in the summer you can see Ben Inver looking like an amiable smiling giant from the drawing-room windows, almost as if he was at the bottom of the garden instead of several miles away ... Scottish miles at that!”
    In her excitement she neglected to drive as carefully as she normally did, and the small cream