the earth. Was she then so beautiful? I don't know. But I like to
persuade myself that she was a fiery, elemental creature of a rare and
pathetic brilliance ... for the sake of her story, no doubt. But, for
the moment, when old Colonel Hoylake, who always began his _Times_ by
quotations from the obituary column--he had survived the age when births
or marriages are interesting--suddenly brought out the word Hewish:
Gabrielle Hewish, I was startled out of the state of pleasant lethargy
into which a day's fishing on the Dulas and the Matthews' beer had
plunged me, and became suddenly wide awake. I had the feeling that some
bright thing had fallen: a kingfisher, a dragonfly. "Hewish," he
murmured again. "Gabrielle Hewish ... Well, well."

"You know the family?"

"Yes, I knew her father, poor feller," he said.

Now I was full of eagerness. It had come over me all at once that this
obituary notice was, for me, a happy release. It meant that, for a month
or two, all through the mesmeric hours that I should spend up to my knees
in the swift Dulas, alone with the dippers and the ring-ousels and the
plaintive sand-pipers, I should be able to explore, to my own content,
this forbidden treasure, searching in the dark soul of Marmaduke
Considine and the tender heart of Gabrielle; threading the lanes that
spread in a net about the schoolhouse at Lapton Huish; brooding over the
deceptive peace of Overton Manor; recalling the scene in the yew-parlour,
the atmosphere, terrifically charged with emotion, of the day when Mrs.
Payne took her courage in her hands and fought like a maternal tigress
for Arthur's soul. My heart beat faster as I led the old fisherman on
with "Yes?"

He laid aside _The Times_ and lit one of the long Trichinopoly cheroots
that he smoked perpetually, settling himself back in the comfortable
hotel chair.

"Hewish," he said. "Sir Jocelyn Hewish. That was the father's name.
Lived at a place called Roscarna in the west of Ireland. He was an
extraordinarily good fisherman: tied his own flies. I have some
sea-trout flies in my book that he tied thirty years ago ... a kind of
blue teal that he'd invented. Of course they had a fine string of
white-trout lakes--many a good fish I've had there--but the remarkable
thing about Roscarna was this. Right in front of the house at the bottom
of the sunk fence, there ran a stretch of river,--about three hundred
yards of it, clear deep slides with a level muddy