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was going to say to the new arrival about his own actions. She forgot all about how long it was since Scottie had made any attempt to contact her as he got out of the car, a frown on his weathered brawn face, and she smiled at him thankfully.
    He came to her, silent for a moment, taking her hands in his and gazing at her earnestly. “Leonora,” he said at last, “what’s happened to you?” His fingers reached out and gently touched the graze on her cheek, then he took out a handkerchief and folded the clean linen carefully before applying it to the sore place. “I thought you weren’t hurt,” he said, and glanced suspiciously at the youth. “Did he —”
    “Oh no, Scottie!” she hastened to assure him, then smiled a little sheepishly as she held the handkerchief to her face. “I fell flat on my face,” she confessed.
    “But why are you wandering around on foot?” he asked, and looked so anxious that she sought to reassure him as he cast another more than suspicious glance at the young man, who now looked as much sheepish as disgruntled.
    “My car broke down,” she explained, “and I rang Clive to come and fetch me.”
    “Aye, I know,” he said, and she blinked to have the mystery of her uncle’s visitor so quickly solved. “You’d best come back with me,” he decided, without giving her time to express curiosity about his visit to the studio. “We can arrange something about your car later.”
    She felt ashamed of feeling so utterly limp with relief when she had always thought of herself as very independent. Her experience had scarcely been harrowing, and everyone, even her would-be Romeo, had been very kind to her, but somehow she was quite inordinately glad to see Scottie and she looked up at him through a hazy mist.
    “Bless you, Scottie,” she said huskily. “I feel a bit limp and sorry for myself.”
    “Aye, of course you do!” He put a protective arm round her shoulders and she leaned against him for a moment, while he turned again to the young man who was watching with a hint of a sneer on his full mouth.
    He murmured something in Italian and she saw the flush of anger that coloured Scottie’s face as the arm about her shoulders tightened. The reply was in fluent and apparently virulent Italian too and the youth’s dark eyes blazed for a moment at them both before he shrugged with Latin resignation and slouched off down the dusty road.
    Scottie’s command of the language would have surprised her more if she had not been reminded again of that elegant and mysterious visitor in the cafe. It had been something in the hard glitter of the youth’s dark eyes that reminded her and her speculation began all over again.
    “Come along, my lass,” Scottie told her, and smiled comfortingly, his arm still round her shoulders as he saw her into the car.
    The long, rakish-looking Ferrari whose powerful engines had announced its coming long before it appeared. Both the car and the speed it had been driven at surprised Leonora when she thought about it, for both seemed uncharacteristic of the Scottie she thought she knew.
    “I was never so glad to see anyone in my life,” she confessed as they sped along the coast road back to Terolito, and Scottie glanced at her over his shoulder.
    “That young blood was getting out of hand, was he?” he
    asked quietly, and she shrugged uncertainly.
    “I don’t really know what he would have done,” she said with a wry smile. “I have a feeling that his bark was probably worse than his bite, though.”
    “He was sassy enough to make a crack about me not being your uncle,” he told her quietly, and she could not help smiling as she imagined what his answer to that had been.
    “I was very glad to see you,” she assured him. “You were the last person I expected.
    “Your uncle said you were stranded,” he informed her, and she looked at him curiously.
    “You were with Clive when I rang?”
    “I was.” He took another bend in the road with a skill that