Free Land of Heart's Desire by Catherine Airlie

you tell me why?”
    “I—” She met his eyes and could not tell him. “No one at Erradale House knows where I am,” she explained lamely. “They are bound to worry if I don’t get back.”
    “That’s easily remedied,” he assured her. “I can take you round by sea.”
    “There isn’t a steamer,” she began.
    “I have my own boat now,” he informed her. “It was delivered yesterday.” His eyes lost some of their flintiness. “That’s one reason why I’ve always wanted to live on an island,” he added.
    Possession, she thought. The new boat would be a luxurious cabin-cruiser worth a small fortune, with the powerful sort of engines necessary to get him away from Croma and across to the mainland whenever he wanted to go, independently of any steamer!
    “It’s very kind of you,” she found herself saying frigidly, “but there’s really no need for you to go all the way round to Port-na-Keal on my account. I have friends at Scoraig, and I can wait there for the next tide.”
    “Rather a long wait,” he pointed out. “And it still doesn’t solve the problem of letting your grandmother know you are safe. What we really need,” he went on when she could not find any logical reply to that, “is a different sort of causeway over the ford.” He turned towards the narrow neck of land where the Atlantic was already foaming in over the shallow stones. “We need a road, preferably built on piers, with a substantial breakwater on either side. It would be easy enough. This present arrangement is as antiquated as the dodo. What we want is a permanent link between the two ends of the island, something strong enough to withstand the elements or anything else that might try to break it.”
    “Aren’t you forgetting,” she suggested coldly, “that all this would cost a great deal of money?”
    “That needn’t matter,” he said. “I have the money.”
    She turned to face him.
    “But we haven’t, Mr. Sutherland,” she reminded him. “And this would have to be a joint affair. One half of the causeway is on MacNeill land.”
    “That would be a detail,” he told her magnanimously. “We could do this together.”
    She looked at him pityingly.
    “I wonder if I can make you understand what money means here, Mr. Sutherland,” she said. “Or, rather, the lack of it. If we had the amount of money you propose to spend on a causeway, we could find other things to do with it. The fact that the road from Erradale to Scoraig is only open twice within twenty-four hours for a very short time doesn’t count with us at all. We have become used to it. It has been part of our way of life for hundreds of years, and we have learned to accept it.”
    “You keep repeating that,” he pointed out, “as if it were a virtue, but really it isn’t, you know. Don’t you want to move with the times?”
    “Within limits!”
    He smiled at that.
    “Need you make them such narrow limits?” he queried. “But never mind! We won’t go into the question of the causeway, here and now, although if we had it we could also have telephonic communication between the two villages—and that would at least have solved your present dilemma!”
    He turned towards Scoraig and she gave the rapidly deepening ford a last despairing glance as she prepared to follow him.
    “We had better put back the notice, hadn’t we?” she suggested.
    “Yes,” he agreed, “it would be safer.”
    She held it for him while he nailed it back on the rough post from which she had torn it, using the butt of his gun as a hammer.
    “I think you ought to have a look at your own side of the cliff,” he advised, “or let your agent do it. ‘Factors’ you call them over here, don’t you? We use the word in some parts of Canada, too. It accents our close Scottish connections, I guess. Funny,” he mused, “just the odd word and an old custom or two, but they keep the bonds forged as strongly as ever!”
    “Are you your own factor now, Mr. Sutherland?”