, you would think, and cold as winter."

"Let us go swimming."

"The day's getting late and it's growing cold. However, if you want
to--"

Ian did not greatly want to. But if Alexander could be so indifferent,
he could be determined and ardent. "What's a little mirk and cold? I
want to say I've swum in it." He began to unbutton his waistcoat.

They stripped, left their clothes in the stone's keeping, and ran down
the moorside. The light played over their bodies, unblemished, smooth,
and healthfully colored, clean-lined and rightly spare. They had
beautiful postures and movements when they stood, when they ran; a
youthful and austere grace as of Spartan youth plunging down to the
icy Eurotas. The earth around lay as stripped as they; the naked,
ineffable blue ether held them as it did all things; the wandering air
broke against them in invisible surf. They ran down the long slope of
the moor, parted the reeds, and dived to meet their own reflections.
The water was most truly deep and cold. They struck out, they swam to
the middle of the pool, they turned upon their backs and looked up to
the blue zenith, then, turning again, with strong arm strokes they
sent the wave over each other. They rounded the pool under the twisted
willows, beside the shaking reeds; they swam across and across.

Alexander looked at the sun that was deep in the western quarter.
"Time to be out and going!" He swam to the edge of the pool, but
before he should draw himself out stopped to look up at a willow above
him, the one that he thought he might, in the mist, have taken for the
kelpie's daughter. It was of a height that, seen at a little distance,
might even a tall woman. It put out two broken, shortened branches
like arms.... He lost himself in the study of possibilities, balanced
among the reeds that sighed around. He could not decide, so at last he
shook himself from that consideration, and, pushing into shallow
water, stepped from the pool. He had taken a few steps up the moor ere
with suddenness he felt that Ian was not with him. He turned. Ian was
yet out in the middle ring of the tarn. The light struck upon his
head. Then he dived under--or seemed to dive under. He was long in
coming up; and when he did so it was in the same place and his
backward-drawn face had a strangeness.

"Ian!"

Ian sank again.

"He's crampit!" Alexander flashed like a thrown brand down the way he
had mounted and across the strip of weeds, and in again t