en, on the farther side, other ridges went ribbing away in the
distance, like billows of dark verdure; but on the right, where they
ended, sloping abruptly to the more even ground of the gently undulating
country beyond, far away in a film of light and vista, to lose itself in
a hazy blue on the skyline nearly a hundred miles distant, stretched a
vast mysterious wilderness. Then she sat down beneath the shade of a
large overhanging wild fig, to take it all in.

She was used to wildness, and loved it. Reared in one of the wildest
tracts of wild Ireland, she had delighted to go forth on solitary
rambles, with trout rod and creel, more than ankle deep in soft bog
soil, tramping laboriously to her field of action in high mountain
lough, where the shrieking gust of a squall every half hour or so drove
her to refuge beneath some great rock, what time the trout sulked, only
to rise fast and furious when the rain squall had passed, and the raven
croaked from the shining wet crags. And this solemn blue vista,
stretching away in its vastness, formed a contrast indeed to the stormy
glistening grandeur of her former mountain home; here with its hot,
sub-tropical steaminess; yet there was that in common between both of
them--that both were the wilds.

In the dreaminess of her reverie she started suddenly. The loud
neighing of a horse, together with the violent flapping of an empty
saddle as the animal shook himself, caused a sudden inroad upon her
meditations that produced that effect. There, hitched to a bush, stood
a horse, one moreover that she seemed to recognise. Yes, it was the
large, high-withered roan that Lamont had ridden when, at her urgent
request, he had entered for the tent-pegging competition and--had not
won.

In a moment Clare's meditations, dreamy and otherwise, were scattered to
the winds. There was the horse, but--where was its owner? A strange
inclination--impulse, rather--to get away, to return before he should
discover her presence, came upon her. Yet--why? Why on earth--why?

But whatever the ground for such aspirations they were not to be
fulfilled, for at that moment a voice hailed her--an astonished voice.

"Why, Miss Vidal, good morning. Who in the world would have dreamed of
meeting you up here?"

"I might say the same, Mr Lamont. I thought I would take a bit of a
stroll while all Gandela was sleeping off last night's orgies. Strange,
but I've never been up here. I suppose it is becau