The Unbroken Line by H.C. McNeile — Read

And so, but for a strange turn in the wheel of fate, the matter would / have rested as far as I was concerned. For an evening the story of the / sixteenth Earl Fingarton and his wife Betty had appealed to my / imagination, then stress of work drove it from my mind. In Scotland, / especially in the Highlands, the fierce pride of family and clan seems / natural and right: from time immemorial that pride has been a dominant / trait of those who live there.

And up in Skye, where I wandered for a while before settling down to / work, the old Earl's action seemed easier to understand. As a man, / his heart had died with his wife Betty; as the sixteenth of his line, he / had gone forth into the world, which had ceased to interest him, and / taking unto himself another wife, had waited until she gave him a son. / Then, his duty over, he had come back to his dead and his memories. / Callous, perhaps, to the living; primitive in his treatment of his / second wife, as men of old were primitive in their treatment of women, / regarding them as merely the bearers of their children -- yet / understandable. Look on the glory of Glen Sligachan, and it is / understandable. Country such as that in another part of the Highlands / belonged to the Fingartons, and the breathless marvel of it is not to be / lightly parted with. It must remain for a man's son, and his son's son / . a sacred heritage. There must be no outsider to break the line.