ion as to what rash step his
host might be taking. Plainly the young man had not yet made Miss
Wishart's acquaintance.

IV

The sun set in the thick of the dark hills, and a tired and merry party
scrambled down the burnside to the highway. They had long outstayed
their intention, but care sat lightly there, and Lady Manorwater alone
was vexed by thoughts of a dinner untouched and a respectable household
in confusion. The sweet-scented dusk was soothing to the senses, and
there in the narrow glen, with the wide blue strath and the gleam of the
river below, it was hard to find the link of reality and easy to credit
fairyland. Arthur and Miss Wishart had gone on in front and were now
strayed among boulders. She liked this trim and precise young man,
whose courtesy was so grave and elaborate, while he, being a recluse by
nature but a humanitarian by profession, was half nervous and half
entranced in her cheerful society. They talked of nothing, their hearts
being set on the scramble, and when at last they reached the highway and
the farm where the Glenavelin traps had been put up, they found
themselves a clear ten minutes in advance of the others.

As they sat on the dyke in the soft cool air Alice spoke casually of the
place. "Where is Etterick?" she asked; and a light on a hillside
farther up the glen was pointed out to her.

"It's a very fresh and pleasant place to stay at," said Arthur. "We're
much higher than you are at Glenavelin, and the house is bigger and
older. But we simply camp in a corner of it. You can never get Lewie
to live like other people. He is the best of men, but his tastes are
primeval. He makes us plunge off a verandah into a loch first thing in
the morning, you know, and I shall certainly drown some day, for I am
never more than half awake, and I always seem to go straight to the
bottom. Then he is crazy about long expeditions, and when the Twelfth
comes we shall never be off the hill. He is a long way too active for
these slack modern days."

Lewie, Lewie! It was Lewie everywhere! thought the girl. What could
become of a man who was so hedged about by admirers? He had seemed to
court her presence, and her heart had begun to beat faster of late when
she saw his face. She dared not confess to herself that she was in
love--that she wanted this Lewis to herself, and bated the pretensions of
his friends. Instead she flattered herself with a fiction. Her ground
was the high one of an interest i