Master of Glenkeith by Jean S. Macleod

“I wondered if he’d be letting it go this year.”
    “And let you in with your Ardnashee seconds? No fear!” Daniel declared with a twinkle. “It’s the only way you’d win with that Ardnashee Glory of yours, of course,” he added with a wicked chuckle. “But maybe if you were to put your heart into breeding decent stock you could come a close second to Glenkeith!”
    “If I spent all my time at Ardnashee, you mean?” Nigel said. “As Andrew does at Glenkeith.”
    “You’d get results,” the old man told him more seriously.
    “Maybe I shall.” Nigel straightened, his dark eyes full on Tessa’s absorbed young face where she sat watching on the parapet of the bridge.
    She could be so many things to a man, he thought abstractedly, and already she seemed to be fitting in up here in their mountain stronghold, whatever was happening at Glenkeith. In her honey-coloured tweeds she wore now as naturally as any Scotswoman, she still possessed a sort of piquant charm which set her apart. She was different. Fey was almost the word he sought when he saw her with that far-away look in her eyes and the softly expectant smile on her lips. He could imagine her painting very well and meant to ask her about her pictures at the first opportunity.
    With a final effort he jacked up the chair on a handy boulder and tapped the wheel into place, but the hub had gone and Tessa thought that it, too, must have come off farther up the glen road.
    “Well, we can get down as far as the car like this,” Nigel decided, “and then we can either stow the chair in the back or leave it in the clearing till we can collect it. It will be perfectly safe.”
    Tessa thought, however, that she would rather wheel the empty chair all the way back to Glenkeith. It would give her time to adjust herself to the thought of Andrew and save him coming all the way up the glen for it later on.
    “I could be back in plenty of time for dinner,” she suggested, “and Mr. Haddow will have got you to Glenkeith before anyone has started to be anxious.” Behind the thought had been a sudden desire to be alone, a desire she had only experienced on one or two occasions in the past when she had come face to face with some important issue and needed time to consider it, to think it out clearly and to her own personal satisfaction. The thought in her mind now was her attitude to Andrew, this strange feeling which the very mention of his name produced in her, the subtle, almost inevitable sense of conflict in the future which would so surely involve them both.
    At times it ran in her veins like fire, the desire to be noticed by him, to be considered, like a wilful child’s obsession with an adult who has already dismissed it.
    Perhaps that was how Andrew really saw her, as a child, wilful and headstrong where her own desires were concerned, and she did not know how she was to make him see differently.
    Slowly, carefully, she helped Nigel to transfer Daniel Meldrum into his car.
    “We’ll strap the chair on to the back,” Nigel decided. “There’s plenty of room if I rest it on the hood cover.”
    “I could quite easily walk with it,” Tessa protested.
    “There’s absolutely no need,” said Nigel firmly. Did he
    know that she shrank from encountering Andrew right away? Did he guess that she was almost afraid, with her heart beating like a cornered wild thing against her breast? There was no answer to that question. Not yet.
    Nigel drove steadily along the glen road, far more steadily, Tessa realized, than he would have done if they had been alone. The car was cut out for speed and even on the winding glen roads she could imagine him going fast, but to-day he had a passenger who must be treated with the utmost consideration and Nigel Haddow was essentially thoughtful, although he had also learned to be selfish. His mother was a woman who had given unstintedly, asking little in return, which had not been really good for her children, and since her older son