Free Anna of Strathallan by Essie Summers Page B

took it all most good- naturedly.
    Philip, who usually went home for the evening meal, stayed too. It was his own suggestion. Anna caught the twinkle in her grandmother's eye. Philip said, 'You've all those lambs to feed. I'll give them a round of drinks after you've washed up. I've an idea Anna would enjoy feeding them. I'll show her how.'
    Anna wasn't going to encourage this. 'Sorry, perhaps the children would help. I want to get that bandage off Calum's head and re-dress it. It looks anything but comfortable at the moment. He must have dragged that cap off too roughly. The way he's been trying to ease it right through dinner, makes me suspect the lint is catching on the stitches, and pulling on them, and there's nothing more annoying.'
    •Calum said hastily, 'There's nothing wrong with it. Besides, you mightn't get it back right. I believe there's a real technique involved in capelline bandages. Better leave well alone.'
    She said crisply, 'I happen to have that technique. If you'd not been so dopey last night you might've remembered me saying to the doctor I'd done nurse-aiding. That was during one of Mother's spells of being sure I was too tied to the guest-house.'
    Maggie said hastily, 'Philip, you can feed the lambs on your own, can't you? We'd like to watch.'
    'Oh, no, you don't,' said Anna, getting up. She put a firm hand on Calum's shoulder. 'Into the bathroom where it's private.' Meekly he did as bid.
    She sat him on a stool, scrubbed up well, brought out the well-stocked first-aid kit from the cupboard, began unrolling the bandage.
    He said, 'Enjoyed making me reverse my opinion of you, as stated in the hospital, didn't you?'
    Her laugh had so much amusement in it, and no resentment, that he looked searchingly at her. She pulled a face. 'Of course I did. I'd have been less than human if I hadn't enjoyed setting that preconceived idea right.'
    He persisted. 'Ah, but would you have been quite as devoted to your duties ... your new duties... today, if you hadn't overheard that?'
    Now her cheeks did show the flush of anger. 'What a very unpleasant remark! How distrustful you must be, Calum Doig. You think my spurt of energy, my disregard of mud and mucous and manure, was merely actuated by a desire to put you in the wrong?'
    He sighed. 'That wasn't why I said it. Ouch!'
    'Sorry. Then why was it?'
    'Just that I hold a watching brief for Kit and Gilbert. They were friends of my own grandparents. What they own they've won by sheer hard work and it had to triumph over heartbreak too. To see them so happy over you fills me with dread in case, if you too let them down, their second state will be even worse than their first. They'd adjusted themselves to knowing they'd never see their son again. As my own mother has always said, you can get used to anything, even to being bludgeoned by fate. But I'd hate to see them take another knock.'
    'Such as?'
    'Such as being disillusioned again. If you drift into their lives then out again, it will leave their existence more empty than before.'
    'So you mean if I don't intend to stay, it would be kinder to vamoose now, before they get too fond of me?'
    'I didn't say that.'
    'But you implied it.'
    'I didn't. I was just warning you not to promise too much, to make yourself indispensable, to allow them to plan for a future that would include you.'
    'You mean because I said I might take a job in Auckland?'
    'Yes, you did say it, didn't you?'
    'I did. But that was in the heat of the moment when you so unjustly accused me of coming for what I may - at some terrible date when Grandmother and Grandfather are no more - inherit. Inheritance doesn't just mean hard cash you know, dollars and cents, it means an inheritance of belonging, of feeling one of a family, of knowing one's family history, treading in the footsteps of generations of kinsfolk. Something you've probably known all your life. Something I've never known. When my mother's old uncle died she hadn't a relation left in the world -