‘Phew! There’s not a breath of air in this valley. One had need be a salamander to appreciate a morning like this. But what a lovely nook it is—eh, Mac? Quite worth coming half-a-dozen miles to see.’
‘That it’s very pretty, I’ll not attempt to deny; but still’——
‘By no means equal to what you could show us t’other side of the Border,’ said the vicar with a twinkle. ‘That’s understood, of course.’
The time was the forenoon of the day following the evening on which Madame De Vigne had been so startled by the sudden appearance of one whom she had every reason to believe had died long years before.
The scene was a small but romantic glen. Over the summit of a cliff, at the upper end of a rocky ravine, a stream, which took its rise among the stern hills that shut in the background, leapt in a cascade of feathery foam. After a fall of some fifteen or twenty feet, it reached a broad, shallow basin, in which it spread itself out, as if to gather breath for its second leap, which, however, was not quite so formidable as its first one. After this, still babbling its own liquid music, it fretted its way among the boulders with which its channel was thickly strewn, and so, after a time, left the valley behind it; and then, less noisily, and lingering lovingly by many a quiet pool, it gradually crept onward to the lake, in the deep bosom of whose dark waters lay the peace for which it seemed to have been craving so long.
A steep and somewhat rugged pathway wound up either side of the glen to the tableland at the summit, overhung with trees and shrubs of various kinds, with a rustic seat planted here and there at some specially romantic point of view. Ferns, mosses, flowers, and grasses innumerable clothed the rocky sides of the ravine down almost to the water’s edge. At the foot of the glen the stream was spanned by a quaint old bridge, on which the vicar and Dr M‘Murdo were now standing. It was the day of the picnic of which Madame De Vigne had made mention to Colonel Woodruffe, and the party from the Palatine had driven over in a couple of wagonettes, which, together with the hampers containing luncheon, were stationed in a shady spot a quarter of a mile lower down the valley.
‘Look, Mac, look!’ exclaimed the vicar, ‘at those two speckled darlings lurking there in the shadow of the bridge. I must come and try my luck here one of these days.’
‘You look just a bit feckless this morning without your rod and basket.’
‘Where was the use of bringing them? No trout worth calling a trout would rise on a morning like this, when there’s not a cloud in the sky as big as one’s hand, and not breeze enough to raise a ripple on the water. I’ve brought my hammer instead, so that I shan’t want for amusement. Ah, Mac, what a pity it is that you care nothing either for angling or geology!’
‘I could not be fashed, as we used to say in the North. Every man to his likes. I’ve got a treatise in my pocket on The Diaphragm and its Functions, just down from London, with diagrams and plates. Now, if I can only find a shady nook somewhere, I’ve no doubt that I shall enjoy myself with my book for the next two or three hours quite as much as you with your rod or hammer.’