mong the noisy fallen leaves, posturing the heroes of his
reading or his own imagination about him in the landscape--a pleasant
recreation. He would set Bruce the king himself sitting at a cave-mouth,
a young gentleman with a queue like Turner's, pondering upon freedom,
while the spiders wrought for his instruction; deer breaking from covert
to dash away, or moving in stately herds across the forest openings,
became a foreign cavalry. Sometimes he would take a book to the upper
hunting-roads, where rarely any intrusion came except from some gillie
or fisher of the lochs far back in the moors, and stretched on dry
bracken he would read and dream for hours.

It was in such an attitude Young Islay found him on the Saturday after
the episode on the Ramparts. Gilian was in the midst of the same book,
trying hard to fill up the gaps that his sacrifice of leaves had brought
into the narrative, and Young Islay going a-fishing in the moor-lochs,
a keen sportsman all alone, stood over him a very much surprised
discoverer.

He gave an halloo that brought Gilian to his feet alarmed, for it
happened to fit in with some passage in his mind where foes cried. In
vain the book went behind the Paymaster's boy; Islay saw the ragged
pages.

"Oh!" he cried, "you'll not cheat me this time; you're reading." An
annoying contempt was in his manner, and as he stood with his basket
slung upon his back, and his rod in the crook of an arm, like a gun,
a straight, sturdy lad of neat limb, a handsome face, and short black
curls, he was, for a moment, more admirable in Gilian's eyes than the
hero of the book he was ashamed to show.

"I had it in my pocket," said Gilian, in a poor, ineffective
explanation, relinquishing the volume with a grudge to the examination
of this cynic.

"You pretended on the Ramparts you were tearing it up like any other
boy," said Young Islay, "and I was sure you were doing nothing of the
kind." He turned over the pages with scornful fingers. "It's not a
school-book, there's not a picture in it, it's full of talking--fancy
being here with that rubbish, when you might be fishing with me!"

Gilian snatched the volume from him. "You don't know anything about it!"
he cried.

"I know _you_ at any rate," said Young Islay craftily. "You were ashamed
of your book; you come here often with books; you do nothing like
anybody else; you should have been a girl!"

All the resentment of the Paymaster's boy sprung to his head at t