The Highlander's Last Song

A wealthy London family eats breakfast in a Highland house they have just bought, in a dining room holding everything such a room ought to hold and nothing anybody chose. Out one window are the western sea and its islands; out the other, heather hills rolling east toward the mountains. Alister Macruadh, young chief of what is left of the clan, farms his own ground. His brother Ian has come home from Russia. Their mother Isobel raised both of them on the question of what a man owes.

The quarrel the original title names is over what owning a thing means. Peregrine Palmer holds the deed, bought with a fortune made in brewing and distilling. The Macruadhs hold the loyalty of the people still on the land, and nothing else. MacDonald sets the argument inside a courtship and then tightens it: Alister asks for Mercy Palmer without a shilling of her father's money, and her father answers by offering to make the ancestral Clanruadh lands over to the chief himself. The chief can have his land back, out of money he despises. Ian meanwhile sails for Canada to see whether the clan should follow the emigrants already gone.

The honest caveat is the volume itself. This is Michael Phillips's edited reissue under a new title. What's Mine's Mine, 1886, ran to three volumes; this is a 271-page version of it, so most of what MacDonald wrote is not here, and the sentences that remain are not reliably his. MacDonald also preaches, at length and often, in the novel this was cut down from; how much of that survives the edit is not something the packaging tells you.