The Last of the Kintyres Read Online Free PDF Page A

dog!” Caroline reprimanded. “The lady doesn’t like to be kissed by strange little girls!”
    Tony laughed obligingly, settling himself in the front seat with obvious satisfaction, and Caroline drove away.
    Elizabeth’s impressions of that first drive along the lovely, indented coastline of Lome were necessarily blurred because of her anxiety about the man they had come all this distance to meet. Already Sir Ronald Kintyre had become a personality to her and she had allowed her mind to drift back in fancy down the years to those far-off days when he and her mother had been youthful sweethearts.
    What a love story it must have been, cradled here among these everlasting hills with their deep blue lochs opening out to the sea and a myriad islands set along the horizon for them to sail among!
    Yet nothing had come of their brief idyll. They had gone their separate ways, and now their children were meeting, after thirty years ...
    She thrust the thought of Hew Kintyre from her. How obvious he had made it that he did not share such sentimental illusions about their meeting! Yet she felt more sure, with every minute that passed, that Sir Ronald had always cherished a very tender memory of his first love. And once or twice she had surprised a gentle smile in her mother’s eyes as she had spoken about Ardlamond and the past. There had been that day when she had been reading aloud from the book of poems and had come unexpectedly on five lines which had caused her to close it almost immediately.
    “ I shall be telling this with a sigh,” she had read
    “ ‘ Somewhere ages and ages hence:
    Two roads diverged in a wood and I—
    I took the one less travelled by,
    And that has made all the difference’.’’
    “We’re almo st there now,” Caroline Hayler announced. “You can see the islands out in the firth today. They’re rather lovely with the sun on them” Away to the west the Islands lay like a string of green beads on a bed of blue-green water—Seil and Easedale and Luing and Shona and the distant, misty Isles of the Sea. Scarba was a black bastion to the south, but Mull had captured the sun and her sheer red basalt cliffs reared up against a sky of flame and turquoise with the yellow banners of departing day trailing across it like golden veils. They lay across the brow of Ben More and trailed lightly on Ben Talla, drifting down into the great glen which cleaved the island in two.
    It was sheer magic, and Elizabeth filled her heart with it, knowing that this was all and more than she had expected of her mother’s country.
    The road they had taken wound round the head of a loch and climbed and wound again, an easy, meandering road which finally turned towards the west, straight into the setting sun.
    For a moment that strange flaming light blinded her and then, looking down towards the sea, she saw Ardlamond Lodge for the first time.
    It stood on a promontory above a small, secluded bay closed in by a long green island from the full rush of the Atlantic tide, and it looked so remote that time itself seemed arrested there. Gulls lifted and wheeled from the island’s pinnacles of rock, flying towards the land, and she seemed to hear an echo of their incessant crying deep in her heart.
    It was a lonely place, yet the house itself was lovely. Long and low and white, it nestled in a cleft of the rock with a natural terrace of unbelievably green grass in front of it and the cliff behind, and all its windows were open to the last of the sun.
    The sunshine seemed to li e on it like a benediction, that old house that had seen so many suns go down, and suddenly an overwhelming sense of loss gripped Elizabeth by the throat. She could not think nor reason clearly, and she had not the power to thrust it away.
    The sun sank abruptly, going down behind the mountains of Mull as if a light had been extinguished in a distant room, and she shivered involuntarily in the paler aftermath. It was as if all warmth had suddenly gone out