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family had left Heimra by that time. I was in Malta with the R.A.F. when Margot first met Blair. She wasn’t an island girl—she met Blair in Glasgow—but she made the most of her knowledge of Heimra to attract him. I guess she saw her chance and took it,” he added harshly. “Blair could give her so much more tha n I could, and I dare say she felt that she could persuade him to live away from the island some of the time. He had the money and the position to do that, too.”
    There was a long, uneasy silence in which the events of those bleak years seemed to pass before his anguished eye, and then he said:
    “I never saw her again. I couldn’t go back. The island was finished, as far as I was concerned. There was nothing there for me, even after I knew that he was dead. I knew she wouldn’t stay on there—Margot wasn’t that type—and, anyway, I never wanted to see her again. I suppose I thought a lot about faith and broken promises in those days. Now it’s different.”
    “I don’t think it is,” Alison contradicted gently. “You’ve been hurt, badly hurt, but you’ll love someone again. You’re quite young.”
    “I’m thirty-two.” He stared out across the silvered Firth to the distant, winking light of Pladda. “I’d made up my mind to have a whale of a time for the rest of my life, not to have any roots, just to drift and enjoy myself, but, somehow, these last few months, once or twice, on the ambulance run, I’ve felt that I wasn’t worth much. It was like being out in space with no contact with anyone, anywhere.”
    “If you met Margot again,” Alison said slowly, “it might make a difference.”
    “I never want to see her again!” he declared angrily. “She doesn’t mean a thing to me now. I would never be able to forgive her. I don’t even want to try.”
    The words were a reflection of his terrible bitterness, his deep and continuing hurt.
    “After Gavin Blair died,” Alison said, “the position wasn’t quite the same, was it? There was—the present Blair. Don’t you think he might have offered Margot a home!”
    “She wasn’t the type to stay on an island where there wasn’t ‘ a lot of life’, as she called it. Fergus Blair took up the laird’s duties, I suppose, and that was that. No one on Heimra Mhor knew him very well. He was educated away from the islands, and later he was sent to study medicine at Edinburgh. He was seen about the place in the holidays—a younger son—but that was all. It was said that hi s father, the old laird, disapproved of the medical career, but that could be just hearsay. They were a closely-knit family, I believe, and even Fergus Blair can make my blood boil when I think of him.”
    “Surely he had nothing to do with his brother’s marriage,” Alison protested.
    “I suppose not,” he agreed, thrusting his foot down on the clutch to start the car. “But at one time they were inseparable. Oh! maybe I don’t really blame Blair so much,” he added fiercely. “He didn’t have so very long to appreciate his bargain, after all. It was Margot who was to blame from the beginning.”
    Alison saw that there was nothing to be gained by argument, and she could not really make any protest when he drove far too fast along the winding coast road between Ayr and Irvine, where he decided to take the shorter route back across the Fenwick moors.
    He was gloomily silent most of the way, only shaking himself free from the unhappy past when they reached the door of the Nurses’ Home and came to say goodnight.
    “I’ve given you a rotten evening,” he apologized contritely enough. “I didn’t mean to talk about Margot or Heimra or anything like that. I meant us to be pretty gay together.” He smiled at her ruefully. “Maybe we should have gone dancing, after all,” he suggested.
    And then, Alison thought, she might never have heard about Margot Blair or the tragedy which made Heimra a forbidden island to him. She might never have known about