Doubtless to her father his
name was a household word. So she spoke to him of Glenavelin and its
beauties.

He asked her if she had seen Royston Castle, the residence of his friend
the Duke of Sanctamund. When he had stayed there he had been much
impressed--

Then she spoke wildly of anything, of books and pictures and
people and politics. She found him well-informed, clever, and dogmatic.
The culminating point was reached when she embarked on a stray remark
concerning certain events then happening in India.

He contradicted her with a lofty politeness.

She quoted a book on Kashmir.

He laughed the authority to scorn. "Lewis Haystoun?" he asked. "What
can he know about such things? A wandering dilettante, the worst type
of the pseudo-culture of our universities. He must see all things
through the spectacles of his upbringing."

Fortunately he spoke in a low voice, but Lord Manorwater caught the
name.

"You are talking about Lewie," he said; and then to the table at large,
"do you know that Lewie is home? I saw him to-day."

Bertha Afflint clapped her hands. "Oh, splendid! When is he coming
over? I shall drive to Etterick to-morrow. No--bother! I can't go
to-morrow, I shall go on Wednesday."

Lady Manorwater opened mild eyes of surprise. "Why didn't the boy
write?" And the young Arthur indulged in sundry exclamations, "Oh,
ripping, I say! What? A clinking good chap, my cousin Lewie!"

"Who is this Lewis the well-beloved?" said Mr. Stocks. "I was talking
about a very different person--Lewis Haystoun, the author of a foolish
book on Kashmir."

"Don't you like it?" said Lord Manorwater, pleasantly. "Well, it's the
same man. He is my nephew, Lewie Haystoun. He lives at Etterick, four
miles up the glen. You will see him over here to-morrow or the day
after."

Mr. Stocks coughed loudly to cover his discomfiture. Alice could not
repress a little smile of triumph, but she was forbearing and for the
rest of dinner exerted herself to appease her adversary, listening to
his talk with an air of deference which he found entrancing.

Meanwhile it was plain that Lord Manorwater was not quite at ease with
his company. Usually a man of brusque and hearty address, he showed his
discomfort by an air of laborious politeness. He was patronized for a
brief minute by Mr. Stocks, who set him right on some matter of
agricultural reform. Happening to be a specialist on the subject and an
enthusiastic farmer from his earliest days, he took the rebuke with
proper meekness. The spectacled people were talking earnestly with his
wife. Arthur was absorbed in his dinner and furtive glances at his
left-hand neighbour. There remained Bertha Afflint, whom he had
hitherto admired with fear. To talk with her was exhausting to frail
mortality, and he had avoided the pleasure except in moments of
boisterous bodily and mental health. Now she was his one resource, and
the unfortunate man, rashly entering into a contest of wit, found
himself badly worsted by her ready tongue. He declared that she was
worse than her mother, at which the unabashed young woman replied that
the superiority of parents was the last retort of the vanquished. He
registered an inward vow that Miss Afflint should be used on the morrow
as a weapon to quell Mr. Stocks.

When Alice escaped to the drawing-room she found Bertha and her sister--a
younger and ruddier copy--busy with the letters which had arrived by the
evening post. Lady Manorwater, who reserved her correspondence for the
late hours, seized upon the girl and carried her off to sit by the great
French windows from which lawn and park sloped down to the moorland
loch. She chattered pleasantly about many things, and then innocently
and abruptly asked her if she had not found her companion at table
amusing.

Alice, unaccustomed to fiction, gave a hesitating "Yes," at which her
hostess looked pleased. "He is very clever, you know," she said, "and
has been very useful to me on many occasions."

Alice asked his occupation.

"Oh, he has done many things. He has been very brave and quite the
maker of his own fortunes. He educated himself, and then I think he
edited some Nonconformist paper. Then he went into politics, and became
a Churchman. Some old man took a liking to him and left him his money,
and that was the condition. So I believe he is pretty well off now and
is waiting for a seat. He has been nursing this constituency, and since
the election comes off in a month or two, we asked him down here to
stay. He has also written a lot of things and he is somebody's private
secretary." And Lady Manorwater relapsed into vagueness.

The girl listened without special interest, save that she modified her
verdict on Mr. Stocks, and allowed, some degree of respect for him to
find place in her heart. The fighter in life always appealed to her,
whatever the result of his struggle.

Then Lady Manorwater proceeded to hymn his excellences in an
indeterminate, artificial manner, till the men came into the room, and
conversation became general. Lord Manorwater made his way to Alice,
thereby defeating Mr. Stocks, who tended in the same direction. "Come
outside and see things, Miss Wishart," he said. "It's a shame to miss a
Glenavelin evening if it's fine. We must appreciate our rarities."

And Alice gladly followed him into the still air of dusk which made hill
and tree seem incredibly distant and the far waters of the lake merge
with the moorland in one shimmering golden haze. In the rhododendron
thickets sparse blooms still remained, and all along by the stream-side
stood stately lines of yellow iris above the white water-ranunculus.
The girl was sensitive to moods of season and weather, and she had
almost laughed at the incongruity of the two of them in modern clothes
in this fit setting for an old tale. Dickon of Glenavelin, the sworn
foe of the Lord of Etterick, on such nights as this had ridden up the
water with his bands to affront the quiet moonlight. And now his
descendant was pointing out dim shapes in the park which he said were
prize cattle.

"Whew! what a weariness is civilization!" said the man, with comical
eyes. "We have been making talk with difficulty all the evening which
serves no purpose in the world. Upon my word, my kyloes have the best
of the bargain. And in a month or so there will be the election and I
shall have to go and rave--there is no other word for it, Miss
Wishart--rave on behalf of some fool or other, and talk Radicalism which
would make your friend Dickon turn in his grave, and be in earnest for
weeks when I know in the bottom of my heart that I am a humbug and care
for none of these things. How lightly politics and such matters sit on
us all!"

"But you know you are talking nonsense," said the serious Alice. "After
all, these things are the most important, for they mean duty and courage
and--and--all that sort of thing."

"Right, little woman," said he, smiling; "that is what Stocks tells me
twice a day, but, somehow, reproof comes better from you. Dear me!
it's a sad thing that a middle-aged legislator should be reproved by a
very little girl. Come and see the herons. The young birds will be
everywhere just now."

For an hour in the moonlight they went a-sightseeing, and came back very
cool and fresh to the open drawing-room window. As they approached they
caught an echo of a loud, bland voice saying, "We must remember our
moral responsibilities, my dear Lady Manorwater. Now, for instance--"

And a strange thing happened. For the first time in her life Miss Alice
Wishart felt that the use of loud and solemn words could jar upon her
feelings. She set it down resignedly to the evil influence of her
companion.

In the calm of her bedroom Alice reviewed her recent hours. She
admitted to herself that she would enjoy her visit. A healthy and
active young woman, the mere prospect of an open-air life gave her
pleasure. Also she liked the people. Mentally she epitomized each of
the inmates of the house. Lady Manorwater was all she had pictured
her--a dear, whimsical, untidy creature, with odd shreds of cleverness
and a heart of gold. She liked the boy Arthur, and the spectacled
people seemed harmless. Bertha she was prepared to adore, for behind
the languor and wit she saw a very kindly and capable young woman
fashioned after her own heart. But of all she liked Lord Manorwater
best. She knew that he had a great reputation, that he was said to be
incessantly laborious, and she had expected some one of her father's
type, prim, angular, and elderly. Instead she found a boyish person
whom she could scold, and with women reproof is the first stone in the
foundation of friendship. On Mr. Stocks she generously reserved her
judgment, fearing the fate of the hasty.



CHAPTER III

UPLAND WATERS


When Alice woke next morning the cool upland air was flooding through
the window, and a great dazzle of sunlight made the world glorious. She
dressed and ran out to the lawn, then past the loch right to the very
edge of the waste country. A high fragrance of heath and bog-myrtle was
in the wind, and the mouth grew cool as after long draughts of spring
water. Mists were crowding in the valleys, each bald mountain top shone
like a jewel, and far aloft in the heavens were the white streamers of
morn. Moorhens were plashing at the loch's edge, and one tall heron
rose from his early meal. The world was astir with life: sounds of the
_plonk-plonk_ of rising trout and the endless twitter of woodland birds
mingled with the far-away barking of dogs and the lowing of the
full-uddered cows in the distant meadows. Abashed and enchanted, the
girl listened. It was an elfin land where the old witch voices of hill
and river were not silenced. With the wind in her hair she climbed the
slope again to the garden ground, where she found a solemn-eyed collie
sniffing the fragrant wind in his morning stroll.

Breakfast over, the forenoon hung heavy on her hands. It was Lady
Manorwater's custom to let her guests sit idle in the morning and follow
their own desire, but in the afternoon she would plan subtle and
far-reaching schemes of enjoyment. It was a common saying that in her
large good-nature she amused people regardless of their own expense.
She would light-heartedly make town-bred folk walk twenty miles or bear
the toil of infinite drives. But this was after lunch; before, her
guests might do as they pleased. Lord Manorwater went off to see some
tenant; Arthur, after vain efforts to decoy Alice into a fishing
expedition, went down the stream in a canoe, because to his fool's head
it seemed the riskiest means of passing the time at his disposal; Bertha
and her sister were writing letters; the spectacled people had settled
themselves below shady trees with voluminous papers and a pile of books.
Alice alone was idle. She made futile expeditions to the library, and
returned with an armful of volumes which she knew in her heart she would
never open. She found the deepest and most comfortable chair and placed
it in a shady place among beeches. But she could not stay there, and
must needs wander restlessly about the gardens, plucking flowers and
listlessly watching the gardeners at their work.

Lunch-time found this young woman in a slightly irritable frame of mind.
The cause direct and indirect was Mr. Stocks, who had found her alone,
and had saddled her with his company for the space of an hour and a
half. His vein had been _badinage_ of the serious and reproving kind, and
the girl had been bored to distraction. But a misspent hour is soon
forgotten, and the sight of her hostess's cheery face would have
restored her to good humour had it not been for a thought which could
not be exorcised. She knew of Lady Manorwater's reputation as an
inveterate matchmaker, and in some subtle way the suspicion came to her
that that goddess had marked herself as a quarry. She found herself
next Mr. Stocks at meals, she had already listened to his eulogy from
her hostess's own lips, and to her unquiet fancy it seemed as if the
others stood back that they two might be together. Brought up in an
atmosphere of commerce, she was perfectly aware that she was a desirable
match for an embryo politician, and that sooner or later she would be
mistress of many thousands. The thought was a barbed vexation. To Mr.
Stocks she had been prepared to extend the tolerance of a happy
aloofness; now she found that she was driven to dislike him with all the
bitterness of unwelcome proximity.

The result of such thoughts was that after lunch she disregarded her
hostess's preparations and set out for a long hill walk. Like all
perfectly healthy people, much exercise was as welcome to her as food
and sleep; ten miles were refreshing; fifteen miles in an afternoon an
exaltation. She reached the moor beyond the policies, and, once past
this rushy wilderness, came to the Avelin-side and a single plank bridge
which she crossed lightly without a tremor. Then came the highway, and
then a long planting of firs, and last of all the dip of