th sunlight, though as yet there seemed no sun. Behind a peak of hill
it displayed its chastened morning splendours, but a stray affluence of
brightness had sought the nooks of valley in all the wide uplands,
courier of the great lord of heat and light and the brown summer. The
house of Etterick stands high in a crinkle of hill, with a background of
dark pines, and in front a lake, set in shores of rock and heather.
When the world grew bright Lewis awoke, for that strange young man had a
trick of rising early, and as he rubbed sleep from his eyes at the
window he saw the exceeding goodliness of the morning. He roused his
companions with awful threats, and then wandered along a corridor till
he came to a low verandah, whence a little pier ran into a sheltered bay
of the loch. This was his morning bathing-place, and as he ran down the
surface of rough moorland stone he heard steps behind him, and George
plunged into the cold blue waters scarcely a second after his host.

It was as chill as winter save for the brightness of the morning, which
made the loch in open spaces a shining gold. As they raced each other
to the far end, now in the dark blue of shade, now in the gold of the
open, the hill breeze fanned their hair, and the great woody smell of
pines was sweet around them. The house stood dark and silent, for the
side before them was the men's quarters, and at that season given up to
themselves; but away beyond, the smoke of chimneys curled into the still
air. A man was mowing in some field on the hillside, and the cry of
sheep came from the valley. By and by they reached the shelving coast
of fine hill gravel, and as they turned to swim easily back a sleepy
figure staggered down the pier and stumbled rather than plunged into the
water.

"Hullo!" gasped George, "there's old John. He'll drown, for I bet you
anything he isn't awake. Look!"

But in a second a dark head appeared which shook itself vigorously, and
a figure made for the other two with great strokes. He was by so much
the best swimmer of the three that he had soon reached them, and though
in all honesty he first swam to the farther shore, yet he touched the
pier very little behind them. Then came a rush for the house, and in
half an hour three fresh-coloured young men came downstairs, whistling
for breakfast.

The breakfast-room was a place to refresh a townsman's senses. Long and
cool and dark, it was simply Lewis's room, and he preferred to entertain
hi