swer ringing down-stream:

"Coo-oo-ee-e!"

He stood motionless in an attitude of listening and the hail was
repeated.

"Sunset and evening star,"

he quoted in an undertone,

"And one clear call for me...."

There had been a period in his life some years earlier when the
India-rubber Man discovered poetry. For months he read greedily and
indiscriminately, and then, abruptly as it came, the fit passed; but
tags of favourite lines remained in his memory, and the rhythm of
running water invariably set them drumming in his ears.

He turned his back on the whispering river and, scrambling up the bank,
made his way down-stream through the myriad scents and signs of another
summer evening returning to its peace. The path wound through a
plantation of young firs which grew fewer as he advanced, and presently
gave glimpses beyond the tree-trunks of a wide stretch of open turf.
The river, meeting a high wall of rock, swung round noiselessly almost
at right angles to its former course; in the centre of the ground thus
enclosed stood a weather-beaten tent, and close by lay a small
two-wheeled cart with its shafts in the air.

The India-rubber Man paused for a moment on the fringe of the
plantation and stood taking in the quiet scene. The shadowy outline of
a grazing donkey moved slowly across the turf which narrowed to a
single spit of sand, and here, standing upright with her hands at her
sides, was the motionless figure of a girl, staring up the river.
Something in her attitude stirred a poignant little memory in the mind
of the India-rubber Man. In spite of his nearness he still remained
invisible to her against the background of the darkling wood.

"Betty!" he called.

For an instant she stared and then came towards him, moving swiftly
with her lithe, ineffable grace.

"Oh," she cried, "there you are!" She slid her fingers into his
disengaged hand and fell into step beside him. "Bunje," she said with
a little laugh that was half a sigh, "I'm like an old hen with one
chick--I can hardly bear you out of my sight! Have you had good
hunting? What was the evening rise like?"

"It was good," replied the India-rubber Man. "But it was better still
to hear you call."

They came to a tall bush where the blossoms of a wild rose glimmered in
the dusk like moths. The India-rubber Man stabbed the butt of his rod
in the turf, took off his cast-entwined deerstalker and hung it on a
bramble; then he slipped the