indoors yet awhile. Are you busy? Would it trouble you to put me
in the way to the head of the valley? Then, if you will allow me, I will
present myself later.'

Rose thought his request as little in the ordinary line of things as his
appearance. But she turned and walked beside him, pointing out the crags
at the head, the great sweep of High Fell, and the pass over to
Ullswater, with as much _sangfroid_ as she was mistress of.

He, on his side, informed her that on his way to Scotland he had
bethought himself that he had never seen the Lakes, that he had stopped
at Whinborough, was bent on walking over the High Fell pass to
Ullswater, and making his way thence to Ambleside, Grasmere, and
Keswick.

'But you are much too late to-day to get to Ullswater?' cried Rose
incautiously.

'Certainly. You see my hotel,' and he pointed, smiling, to a white
farmhouse standing just at the bend of the valley, where the road turned
towards Whinborough. 'I persuaded the good woman there to give me a bed
for the night, took my carriage a little farther, then, knowing I had
friends in these parts, I came on to explore.'

Rose angrily felt her flush getting deeper and deeper.

'You are the first tourist,' she said coolly, 'who has ever stayed in
Whindale.'

'Tourist! I repudiate the name. I am a worshipper at the shrine of
Wordsworth and Nature. Helen and I long ago defined a tourist as a being
with straps. I defy you to discover a strap about me, and I left my
Murray in the railway carriage.'

He looked at her laughing. She laughed too. The infection of his strong
sunny presence was irresistible. In London it had been so easy to stand
on her dignity, to remember whenever he was friendly that the night
before he had been distant. In these green solitudes it was not easy to
be anything but natural--the child of the moment!

'You are neither more practical nor more economical than when I saw you
last,' she said demurely. 'When did you leave Norway?'

They wandered on past the vicarage talking fast. Mr. Flaxman, who had
been joined for a time, on his fishing tour, by Lord Waynflete, was
giving her an amusing account of the susceptibility to titles shown by
the primitive democrats of Norway. As they passed a gap in the vicarage
hedge, laughing and chatting. Rose became aware of a window and a gray
head hastily withdrawn. Mr. Flaxman was puzzled by the merry flash,
instantly suppressed, that shot across her face.

Presently they r