The Last of the Kintyres Read Free Page A

imagine Hew living anywhere but in the Highlands of Scotland,” he answered. “He’s not the type who would ever come to terms with a town. And besides, Ardlamond is his home.”
    “Yes,” Elizabeth acknowledged slowly. “I suppose I should have recognized that as soon as I met him.” He gave her an odd, quizzical sort of look before he returned to the papers on his desk.
    “You may never see him at Dromore,” he said. “He lives his own strange, isolated sort of life there.” Elizabeth did not know what to make of his statement and would not ask for an explanation. All she hoped was that Dromore was big enough to ensure that they would never meet now that she was quite certain that he resented them going there—even although he had made the necessary arrangements for their journey to Ardlamond Lodge.
    The final details had probably been entrusted to him by Sir Ronald because he was coming to London on business, and that was made fairly obvious by the solicitor’s next remark.
    “Sir Ronald doesn’t see any real reason why you and your brother shouldn’t travel north right away,” Richard Lord informed her. “Tony, of course, must go. He will be in Sir Ronald’s care until he is twenty-one. After that,” he added slowly, “he will come into your grandmother’s money. I never could understand why she didn’t provide more adequately for your mother,” he observed thoughtfully, “instead of leaving a considerable amount of money to accumulate for her grandson. A great many people do that sort of thing for no very obvious reason. However,” he commented, “that’s by the way. Tony can’t touch the money just now, which is perhaps just as well.”
    “Yes,” Elizabeth agreed, “I t hink it is.” Her grey eyes looked troubled. “In so many ways, Mr. Lord, Tony is an enigma. Half a man and half a child. He can be so endearing—and so defiant. I sometimes wonder if I’m going to be able to cope.”
    He leaned across the desk to pat her hand.
    “That was why your mother thought about Sir Ronald, I should think,” he said. “You will have his help.”
    It wasn’t until she had boarded the north-bound train two weeks later and it was steaming out of Euston that Elizabeth realized just how much she was depending upon that help.
    Sometimes she felt completely at a loss when she was trying to cope with Tony, and certainly the past two weeks had been hectic. Rushing through a series of farewell parties which she had found herself unable to attend because there was so much to do otherwise, he had seemed almost indifferent to the breaking up of the only home they had known. She had excused him because she supposed that boys felt differently about such things, and now she told herself that she, too, must forget. This was a new life, and if they ever did come back to London it would not be to the security of a suburban home.
    Her job was assured. A qualified secretary, she had only given it up during these past few months of her mother’s last illness, and she could pick up the threads again easily enough. There was always plenty of that sort of work to be found in a large city.
    It was not of her return to London she was thinking as the train finally thundered across the Border and ran smoothly between the Lowland hills. The thought of Dromore was ever in the forefront of her min d, and the problem of how they would fit in at Ardlamond Lodge.
    They spent the night in Glasgow, at an hotel previously arranged for them by Hew Kintyre, and the very fact strengthened the odd impression that he seemed to have been travelling with them all the way. His strong, dominant personality had left its mark on both their minds, because Tony mused, as the single track wound in among the mountains:
    “One doesn’t have to think of Hew Kintyre living here. You can feel him! These mountains would make a bandit out of any man.”
    Guardedly she laughed at the remark.
    “I didn’t think you were so impressionable,” she