their glares were menacing enough to weaken her resolve. Disregarding them she picked up her tray and with a curt âgoodnightâ started towards the door. Seemingly dumbfounded by her unexpected outburst the couple moved sullenly to let her past.
âSee that!â Isabel remarked spitefully as Kirsty opened the door. âWouldnât think of doing anything for anyone but herself.â Mac opened his mouth ready to speak but Isabel went on, âYouâll just have to stay here or go to the cinema on you own.â
âWhat the â¦?â Mac began to protest but before he could continue Isabel cut in. âGo on, I wouldnât be able to enjoy going out now, not after all this nastiness.â
Seemingly unperturbed Kirsty carried her tray to the stairway. She could still hear the couple wrangling in the kitchen. âWell, havenât I told you often enough. Itâs your own fault. Never mind what you promised your aunt. Give the bloody woman her notice. You can manage without her,â Mac rebuked his wife.
âOh, shut your mouth and go,â Isabel snarled at him. With a muttered oath he came shambling past Kirsty and jerking open the vestibule door let it slam behind him.
Chapter Two
Up in her room Kirsty switched on the light and drew the curtains. The wind-swept sleet scratching against the window reminded her of the cold outside and, lighting the gasfire, she drew her chair as near as she dared to its hissing warmth. She sat stiffly, giving her clenched nerves a chance to relax, for despite her show of composure during the altercation with Isabel and Mac, she had felt outraged at the way they had spoken to her. Now in the privacy of her room outrage waned slowly into self-reproach for having been stupid enough to allow such a shabby pair to crack her customary forbearance. Tonight, especially tonight, she had needed to be calm so as to ponder over the events of the past few days.
The dispute had not been her fault, she comforted herself. It wasnât her nature to be easily roused to angry retort. A child of the Hebrides, she had been inculcated since birth with the pride and the tolerance of the Islander: with the essentiality of masking anger with placidity. She was no stranger to censure. There had been trying times even when her friend Mrs Ross had been the owner of ISLAY , for though the old lady had always taken great pains to ensure that guests were respectable and well-behaved, there had been the inevitable misfits and bracing herself to endure their crankiness had imbued in Kirsty an equanimity of character that had proved well able to withstand provocation.
The unpleasantness in the kitchen had not been her fault, her mind reiterated and yet the conviction tended to rebound interrogatively. It had begun trivially enough so could it have been her own too hasty reaction that had resulted in it developing into such a peevish wrangle?
She could so have easily yielded and agreed to give the guests their late tea and biscuits, and it would have been very little trouble to her to put hot water bottles into their beds and thus enable the couple to go and see their wretched film. But she had acquiesced so often when they had made demands of her free time that they had become arrogant even to the point of giving the impression that she should be beholden to them for allowing her the freedom of choice!
The desolating knowledge that she could not continue at ISLAY had settled in her mind â but so had the realisation that at her age it might not be so easy to find a position that would suit her. She had come to accept that she would have to endure the situation at ISLAY as long as she possibly could ⦠until today. Today her life had suffered a sea change!
Settling more comfortably into her chair and taking up her knitting, she let her mind travel back to the well-remembered day nearly twenty-five years previously when, as a naïve fourteen year old, she had stood