ummit, and reached it to find a wind
blowing from the far Gled valley and cooling the hot air.

Alice found a scrap of rock and climbed to the summit, where she sat
like a small pixie, surveying a wide landscape and her warm and
prostrate companion. Her bright hair and eyes and her entrancing grace
of form made the callous Lewis steal many glances upwards from his lowly
seat. The two had become excellent friends, for the man had that honest
simplicity towards women which is the worst basis for love and the best
for friendship. She felt that at any moment he might call her by some
one or other of the endearing expressions used between men. He, for his
part, was fast drifting from friendship to another feeling, but as yet
he gave no sign of it, and kept up the brusque, kindly manners of his
common life.

As she looked east and north to the heart of the hill-land, her eyes
brightened, and she rose up and strained on tiptoe to scan the farthest
horizon. Eagerly she asked the name of this giant and that, of this
glint of water--was it loch or burn? Lewis answered without hesitation,
as one to whom the country was as well known as his own name.

By and by her curiosity was satisfied and she slipped back into her old
posture, and with chin on hand gazed into the remote distances. "And
most of that is yours? Do you know, if I had a land like this I should
never leave it again. You, in your ingratitude, will go wandering away
in a year or two, as if any place on earth could be better than this.
You are simply 'sinning away your mercies,' as my grandfather used to
say."

"But what would become of the heroic virtues that you adore?" asked the
cynical Lewis. "If men were all home-keepers it would be a prosaic
world."

"Can you talk of the prosaic and Etterick in the same breath? Besides,
it is the old fallacy of man that the domestic excludes the heroic,"
said Alice, fighting for the privileges of her sex.

"But then, you know, there comes a thing they call the go-fever, which
is not amenable to reason. People who have it badly do not care a straw
for a place in itself; all they want is to be eternally moving from one
spot to another."

"And you?"

"Oh, I am not a sufferer yet, but I walk in fear, for at any moment it
may beset me." And, laughing, he climbed up beside her.

It may be true that the last subject of which a man tires is himself,
but Lewis Haystoun in this matter must have been distinct from the
common run