to get the best out of life. No Woolwich and sweating as a
snubbed subaltern for him! He stopped at home, saw his tenants farmed
well, and shot his game. That's my notion of a country gentleman!"

"Father can look after Tarnside and a duty goes with owning land,"
Grace remarked. "A landlord who need not work ought to serve the State.
That idea was perhaps the best thing in the feudal system and it's not
altogether forgotten yet. Father was right when he decided to make you
a soldier."

"He can send me to Woolwich, but after all that's as far as he can go.
You're not at your best when you're improving," Gerald rejoined; and
added with a grin, "You don't like old Alan, do you? I thought you
snubbed him half an hour since."

Grace colored, but did not answer. She had hurt her foot by falling from
a mossy boulder and Thorn had come to help as she floundered across a
shallow pool. She was draggled and her hair was loose, and Thorn's faint
amusement annoyed her. Somehow it hinted at familiarity. She would not
have resented it once, for they had been friends; but when she came home
and he had tried to renew the friendship she had noted a subtle
difference. Alan was forty, but now she had left school the disparity of
their ages was, in a sense, much less marked. Then a shout roused her and
she looked round.

Where the smooth, brown water ran past the alder roots, a very small,
dark object moved in advance of a faint, widening ripple. Grace knew it
was the point of the otter's head; the animal's lungs were empty since
it remained up so long. Next moment plunging dogs churned the pool into
foam, the object vanished, and men ran along the bank to the lower
rapid, while those already there beat the shallow with their poles. The
dogs bunched together and began to swim up stream; Gerald and one or two
more plunged into the water, and for a few moments the otter showed
itself again.

It looked like a fish and not an animal as it broke the surface, rising
in graceful leaps. Then it went down, with the dogs swimming hard close
behind, and Grace thought it must be caught. It was being steadily driven
to the lower end of the stopped rapid, where the water was scarcely a
foot deep. The animal reappeared, plunging in and out among the shallows
but forging up stream, and the men who meant to turn it back closed up.
There was one at every yard across the belt of sparkling foam. They had
spiked poles to beat the water and it seemed impos