mous fisher before the Lord, who
had harried the waters of Scotland and Norway, Florida and Iceland, now
pursued trout no bigger than sardines. The glamour of a thousand
memories hallowed the hours he thus spent by that brown water. He fished
unhasting, religious, like some good Catholic adding one more to the row
of beads already told, as though he would fish himself, gravely, without
complaint, into the other world. With each fish caught he experienced a
solemn satisfaction.

Though he would have liked Barbara with him that morning, he had only
looked at her once after breakfast in such a way that she could not see
him, and with a dry smile gone off by himself. Down by the stream it was
dappled, both cool and warm, windless; the trees met over the river, and
there were many stones, forming little basins which held up the ripple,
so that the casting of a fly required much cunning. This long dingle ran
for miles through the foot-growth of folding hills. It was beloved of
jays; but of human beings there were none, except a chicken-farmer's
widow, who lived in a house thatched almost to the ground, and made her
livelihood by directing tourists, with such cunning that they soon came
back to her for tea.

It was while throwing a rather longer line than usual to reach a little
dark piece of crisp water that Lord Dennis heard the swishing and
crackling of someone advancing at full speed. He frowned slightly,
feeling for the nerves of his fishes, whom he did not wish startled. The
invader was Miltoun, hot, pale, dishevelled, with a queer, hunted look on
his face. He stopped on seeing his great-uncle, and instantly assumed
the mask of his smile.

Lord Dennis was not the man to see what was not intended for him, and he
merely said:

"Well, Eustace!" as he might have spoken, meeting his nephew in the hall
of one of his London Clubs.

Miltoun, no less polite, murmured:

"Hope I haven't lost you anything."

Lord Dennis shook his head, and laying his rod on the bank, said:

"Sit down and have a chat, old fellow. You don't fish, I think?"

He had not, in the least, missed the suffering behind Miltoun's mask; his
eyes were still good, and there was a little matter of some twenty years'
suffering of his own on account of a woman--ancient history now--which
had left him quaintly sensitive, for an old man, to signs of suffering in
others.

Miltoun would not have obeyed that invitation from anyone else, but there
wa