Death of a Cad

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Land of the mountain and the flood.

—Sir Walter Scott.

Henry Withering, playwright, slumped down in the passenger seat of the station wagon after another bleak look out at the forbidding landscape.

“Have we much farther to go, darling?” he asked plaintively.

“Oh, yes,” said his fiancée, Priscilla Halburton-Smythe, cheerfully. “But we should be home before dark.”

Henry wondered whether to point out that, as they seemed to be surely approaching the land of the midnight sun after all those weary hours of travel, there was therefore very little hope of reaching their destination at all. He suddenly found himself too overpowered by the landscape and too depressed by the change it seemed to be creating in Priscilla to say anything, and so he decided to go to sleep instead. But although he determinedly closed his eyes and listened to the hypnotic swish of the windscreen wipers, sleep would not come. Scotland had murdered sleep.

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