It was very early morning, seven o’clock perhaps, and Hugh Kinross, the famous novelist, sat in a camp chair at “Tenby,” his feet on the verandah rail, and marvelled at his fame.
It was not his custom to rise quite so early to do this, but circumstances over which he alone had any control, namely the mountain fly, had driven him out of bed. There are no mosquitoes on the mountains; consequently many householders will not go to the expense of mosquito nets.
But the mountain fly rises earlier than any other fly extant, and the stranger who is not provided with a guardian net, leaping desperately up with it, has the early-rising virtue forcibly thrust upon him.
Later in the day, his wrath forgotten, the novelist writes to his city friends and boasts of the light atmosphere of the mountains, [p44] as if he had had something to do with the manufacture of it.
“I actually find myself rising at six,” he writes, “simply to get out into the delicious air.” And not one mention does he make of the debt he owes to the fly.
Hugh Kinross had been routed out at six and, his first choler spent, was quite pleased with himself. He discovered a path leading to a gully, and in the gully a pool beneath a fall, and here he had a circumscribed but delightful swim. Then he climbed up the gully side again, and the Lomaxes’ home caught his eye, and so pleased the artistic side of him that he leaned over one of its hedges to gaze at it.
And “Greenways” in the clear morning air, nestling in its setting of tender green, splashed everywhere with the light tints of flowers,—“Greenways,” with its eyes turned to the mountain where the marvellous morning lay in the first fresh indescribable blueness that creeps there after the pinks and purples and yellows of the dawn,—“Greenways,” with a chimney at the rear sending up the friendly line of its earliest smoke, begot in him a vague emotion that all the bricks and mortar in the city were incapable of doing. He told himself that he, too, wanted a home;—not the boarding-house life that had been his before fame swooped down on him, nor the more luxurious [p45] club life that had followed, nor a holiday-month like this present one, in a rented cottage with his favourite sister for companion; but a home—like “Greenways”—with a slender woman in white, like the one there moving about the paths. There was no question in his mind but that she must be slender, for he himself and his sister were both stout. How Miss Bibby’s heart would have leapt could she have known whose eyes were watching her as she walked perseveringly up and down, practising the early deep-breathing exercises that she maintained were so essential to health!
And it must be a home with signs of children’s occupancy about—he was quite sure of that. Max and Muffie would have been amazed to know that the little red tricycle on the verandah, and the doll’s perambulator overturned on a path, were assisting a celebrated man to this vague emotion.
“Ridiculous!” he said. “I’m hungry; that’s what it is; this mountain air is doing me good already.”
He crossed the road and went back to “Tenby,” where his sister’s bedroom was yet darkened, and the very servant still slept serenely. He was good-hearted, and could not bring himself to hammer on the doors; but as he went to the pantry to find something for himself, he concluded that they had fortified [p46] themselves against the fly by drawing the sheets over their heads.