He paused with a deprecatory laugh.
"Mrs. Chisholm believes in the system. She has been modeled on it—it's got into her blood; and that's why she's at variance with her daughters. No doubt, the thing's necessary; I'm finding no fault with it. You must remember that we're outsiders, with a different outlook; we've lived in the new West."
Vane strolled on along the terrace thoughtfully. He was not offended; he understood his companion's attitude. Like other men of education and good upbringing driven by unrest or disaster to the untrammeled life of the bush, Carroll had gained sympathy as well as knowledge. Facing facts candidly, he seldom indulged in decided protest against any of them. On the other hand, Vane was on occasion liable to outbreaks of indignation.
"Well," said Vane at length, "I guess it's time to go to bed."
CHAPTER VI
UPON THE HEIGHTS
Vane rose early the next morning, as he had been accustomed to do, and taking a towel he made his way across dewy meadows and between tall hedgerows to the tarn. Stripping where the rabbit-cropped sward met the mossy boulders, he swam out, joyously breasting the little ripples which splashed and sparkled beneath the breeze that had got up with the sun. Coming back, where the water lay in shadow beneath a larchwood which as yet had not wholly lost its vivid vernal green, he disturbed the paddling moor-hens and put up a mallard from a clump of swaying reeds. Then he dressed and turned homeward, glowing, beside a sluggish stream which wound through a waste of heather where the curlew were whistling eerily. He had no cares to trouble him, and it was delightful to feel that he had nothing to do except to enjoy himself in what he considered the fairest country in the world, at least in summertime.
Scrambling over a limestone wall tufted thick with parsley fern, he noticed Mabel stooping over an object which lay among the heather where a rough cartroad approached a wooden bridge. On joining her he saw that she was examining a finely-built canoe with a hole in one bilge. She looked up at him ruefully.
"It's sad, isn't it? That stupid Little did it with his clumsy cart."
"I think it could be mended," Vane replied.