Spoof was already half undressed. "My word, and do the young ladies swim?"
"Jean is the best swimmer I ever knew," I confessed, modestly. "We lived beside a river at home, and she had a way of bagging all the prizes at our swimming races."
"She bagged bigger game than that," Jack put in. "She stored up a lot of trouble for herself and the rest of us by pulling our worthy Frank out of the mill-pond one day, after the bubbles had begun to come." So then I had to tell Spoof about that incident. But I avoided reference to the pledge that had followed it.
"I'm afraid I shall be over here more often than you'll welcome me," said Spoof, as he revelled in the water. "You know, of course, the difference between a bawth and a bath?"
"Don't know that I do," Jack admitted, spouting water after a plunge.
"A bawth," Spoof explained, "is what an Englishman has every morning, and a bath is what a Canadian has Saturday nights."
After that we held Spoof under the water while I counted ten, counting very slowly.
When we had had our swim and dried ourselves on the sand we went back up to the house. The shadows were now falling, long and narrow, to the eastward, and the prairie lay hushed and silent in that deep and peaceful calm which marks the summer evening an hour or two before sundown. The grass had taken on its peculiar evening shade of green; the sunlight was yellow and amber, the stillness so universal and complete that all nature seemed to await in reverence the vesper hour. All but an irrepressible meadow-lark which, from a fence post nearby, thrust its limpid challenge at us as we came up to the house.
After supper Spoof sat and chatted until it was time to light the lamp. Jean set it on the table, and as its yellow glow fell across his face I realized for the first time that Spoof was not a boy, as were Jack and I. There were lines in the cheeks and about the eyes which, magnified by the shadows under the lamplight, bore evidence that Spoof had known more of this world's cares than was hinted by his usual light-hearted conversation.
Presently he was talking of England; easing, perhaps the homesickness in his heart by calling up scenes of leafy lanes and misty sun-shot landscapes linking deeply into his life. He had tales of London as well; tales of art treasures and music and theatres all alight with life and beauty; tales of grave-stones marking the great of a nation with a history reaching back into the early obscurity of Western civilization. Something about the pride he showed in the great deeds of the past seemed to strike us strangely—we of a country whose history was still so much in the future and whose greatest deeds were still to be done.