The House on Gregor's Brae
1971
Essie Summers
Jennifer McGrouther was sick at the thought. Her brother had so much talent and so much of a future in front of him, and now had this chance at an Oxford scholarship—but since their parents’ tragic death had left Jennifer and Mac and their younger brother and sister alone in the world, there was little choice but for Mac to leave school and take a job at the freezing works here in New Zealand’s Dunedin. Then, at the eleventh hour, a a letter from Scotland arrived to say that their last living relative, their Aunt Agnes, had passed away and left them her bed-and-breakfast, in the heart of Rob Roy country. Mac could keep his scholarship, and Jenny could support the children through the bed-and-breakfast!
And also, though Jennifer kept this secret close to her heart, she would see Gregor MacGregor again. Gregor MacGregor, the famous author and Aunt Agnes’s next-door neighbour, but more importantly, Gregor MacGregor, the kind young reporter who many years earlier had befriended a young orphan girl and written the article that led to Jennifer’s adoption. Gregor MacGregor, the young man whom she admired so much and whose books she so loved. Would he recognise her, she wondered? Would he even remember her?
Then came the letters, letters from Gregor MacGregor’s sister practically demanding that Jennifer and Mac sell her the bed-and-breakfast, and another from the man himself, a harsh, unfeeling letter that she would never have thought he could have written. And when the McGrouthers arrived at Gregor’s Brae, and Jennifer happened to meet her new neighbour while out for a walk on the hillside, he not only failed to recognise her, but with shocking rudeness warned her off his property and demanded that she see to it that her guests cease invading his privacy!
How disillusioning, how disappointing that the kind young man of a decade ago had somehow changed into this bitter and forbidding ogre! She would not be driven out, of course—for all that she was adopted, she had the true fighting spirit of the McGrouthers. She would keep the bed-and-breakfast in the face of the MacGregors’ hostility; he could keep his privacy and she would keep her distance. But still . . . what a pity he had turned out as he had. And what could possibly have changed him so?
