saw that he had it on. And if
anything had been wanting to make him quite, quite happy, it was wanting
no more. Or, if it had been, the night that came down and found them
housed in a little old-world inn, with a shining river at its door and
the hush and the odorous darkness of the country lanes about it, must of
itself have supplied the omission; for when all the house was still and
all the lights were out, he crept from his bed and curled up like a dog
on the mat before Cleek's door, and would not have changed places with
an emperor.

They were up and on the river, master and man, almost as soon as the
dawn itself; taking their morning plunge under a sky that was but just
changing the tints of rose to those of saffron before they merged into
the actual light of day; and to the boy the man seemed almost a god in
that dim light, which showed but an ivory shoulder lifting now and again
as he struck outwards and deft his way through a yielding, yellow-grey
waste that leaped in little lilac-hued ripples to his chin, and thence
wavered off behind him in dancing lines of light. And once, when he
heard him lift up his voice and sing as he swam, he felt sure that he
_must_ be a god--that that alone could explain why he had found him so
different from other men, and cared for him as he had never cared for
any human thing before.

From dawn to dark that day was one of unalloyed delight to him. Never
before had the starved soul of him--fed, all his life, when it was fed
at all, from the drippings of the flesh-pots and the "leavings" of the
City--found any savour in the insipid offerings of the Country; never
before had he known what charms lie on a river's breast, what spells of
magic a blossoming hedge and the white "candles" of a horse-chestnut
tree may weave, and never before had a meadow been anything to him but a
simple grass-grown field. To-day Nature--through this man who was so
essentially bred in the very womb of her--spoke to his understanding and
found her words not lost on air. The dormant things within the boy had
awakened. Life spoke; Hope sang; and between them all the world was
changed. Yesterday, he had looked upon this day of idling in the country
as a pleasant interlude, as a happy prologue to those greater delights
that would come when he at last went to Epsom and really saw the famous
race for the Derby. To-day, he was sorry that anything--even so great a
thing as that--must come to disturb such placid hap