e oily swirls of the deep black-brown pools as if at
any moment he expected to see a salmon leap into the air, and not even
uninterested in the calm eddies on the other side, where the smooth
water mirrored the yellow-green bank and the bushes and the overhanging
birch-trees. He sat down for a while, listening absently to this
continuous, soothing murmur, perhaps thinking of the roar of the great
city he had left. He was quite content to be alone; he did not even want
Maurice Mangan to be discoursing to him--in those seasons of calm in
which questions, long unanswered, perhaps never to be answered, will
arise.

Then he rose and went on again, for, from the high-road along which he
had driven, he had caught a glimpse of a wilder part of the glen, where
the river seemed to come tumbling down a rocky chasm, with some huge
boulders in mid-channel; and even now he could hear the distant, muffled
roar of the waters. But all of a sudden he stopped. Away along there,
and keeping guard (like a stork, as Miss Georgie Lestrange had
suggested) above the pool that lay on this side of the double waterfall,
was a young lady, her back turned towards him. So far as he could make
out, she wasn't doing anything; a long fishing-rod, with the butt on the
ground, she held idly in her right hand; while with her left hand she
occasionally shaded her face across towards the west--probably, as he
imagined, she was waiting for some of those smooth-sailing clouds to
come and obscure the too-fierce light of the sun. He knew who she was;
this must be Honnor Cunyngham, Lady Adela's sister-in-law; and of course
he did not wish to intrude on the young lady's privacy; he would try to
pass by behind her unobserved, though here the strath narrowed until it
was almost a defile.

He was soon relieved from all anxiety. Sharper eyes than his own had
perceived him. The young lady wheeled round; glanced at him for a
second; turned again; and then a thin, tall, old man, who had hitherto
been invisible to him, rose from his concealment among the rocks close
to her and came along the river bank. He was a very handsome old man,
this superannuated keeper, with his keen, aquiline nose, his clear, gray
eyes, and frosted hair.

"Miss Honnor says will you hef a cast, sir? There's some clouds will be
over soon."

"Oh, no, thank you, I could not dream of interrupting her," Lionel said;
and then it occurred to him that he ought to go and thank the young lady
herself f