determined for his sport to appear natural, but for all
that a good shot over dogs, and a very accurate, if not instinctive
fisherman. In his boyhood, in Wiltshire, he had learned the technique
of the dry fly, and his successes with trout in gin-clear water made
Jocelyn respect him.

Considine's friendship with Jocelyn must be put to his credit. If he
had been a prig he would either have turned up his nose at his patron's
morals or condoned them with a sense of self-sacrifice and forbearance.
He didn't do either. He just took Jocelyn for what he was worth,
realising the shabby trick that heredity had played him; and his
attitude toward Gabrielle was much the same. He knew that he couldn't
and didn't want to keep pace with her enthusiasms any more than he
could keep pace with the baronet's potations. He had been born on a
bleak downland, and some of its characteristics had got into the thin,
cold humour that was his blood. He was incapable of the generous
passions of the people of Roscarna; but I think he was a good man, for
all that. Even Mrs. Payne, who had reason to be irritated by his
coldness, acknowledged this. And he was as conscientious in his
education of Gabrielle as in the care of his parish.

The child matured very quickly. Physically I mean. That is the way in
the west. Of course she was a great tom-boy, tall for her years, very
frank in her speech and totally unconscious of her sex, as free and
virginal as the young Artemis. The world of books to which Mr.
Considine introduced her in her school-hours was wholly forgotten
outside them. In the woods and on the mountains she throve as a
magnificent young animal, moving with an ease and grace and freedom
that civilised woman has lost. Her clothes were of Connemara homespun,
but to a body such as hers, clothes did not matter. She went barefoot
like the girls of Joyce's Country, and her ankles were as clean cut as
the cannon of a thoroughbred. She wore her black hair in a thick plait
that fell below her waist. She had no friends but Biddy, her father
and Considine, except a few men, contemporaries of Jocelyn, who joked
with her in the hunting field. She knew no women; for ladies did not
call at Roscarna, and the county could never forgive her mother's
origins in Baggott Street. All her life was uncomplicated and
miraculously happy.

This Arcadian state of affairs might well have gone on for ever, if
Jocelyn, feeling that he would like to giv