“My lot, I’m afraid,” she said, “is cast in that same city turmoil—we live in London, you know. It will be hard to go back to that artificial, crowded, stifling atmosphere after this.” Glancing up and round them at the wide moorland and the hills, “Here the soul lies open to all the winds of heaven; there—ah! one can soon forget there is a heaven at all.”
“Hullo!” cried Tom’s voice, some little way behind them; and presently he came up flushed and very much out of breath, and flung himself down in the heather at their feet. “I should like to climb up and touch that snow,” he remarked, after only one minute’s prostrate inaction, resting on his elbows with his chin in his hands and his feet waving slowly about. “I shouldn’t fancy your living in winter, sir,” he went on, looking up at Macpherson, “but perhaps you just shut yourself up with your books, like a dormouse, till the snow clears off?”
“I can’t do that,” said Macpherson, simply. “I have been up this valley sometimes in snow so deep that the three miles took over three hours to walk, and once before I could come back there was such a blinding storm that I had to spend the night in that little black hut—you can just see it, to the right, far up the valley. It is not always safe to go alone, but I generally do because I know almost every stone and tree.”
Tom cross-questioned a little about these winter expeditions, and then voted for refreshments; but Lily laughed at him, and proposed that they should do a little more of the day’s work first, and then the three rose and set forward, Tom engrossing the minister’s attention with a host of such far-fetched and extraordinary questions as only a schoolboy can possibly propound and care to have answered.
When at last they reached the river, after looking about and choosing a place for lunch, Tom condescended to relieve his sister of his own paraphernalia, told her she might “turn out the grub” because he required the basket, and coolly recommended her to mount guard over everything till they came back.
“Are you not going to fish, Miss Echalaz?” asked Macpherson, becoming aware that it was proposed to leave her alone, and not altogether happy at the idea.
“Oh! she’s only chaperon,” cried Tom, impatient to be off, and Lily held up a cloud of white knitting which she said would keep her quiet as long as they liked to be away. Tom uttered an urgent “Oh, sir—please—she really is all right,” Macpherson turned away, and then the two went obliquely down the bank with their rods, and were soon lost to sight.
All was silence but the babbling of the water among the rocks, and the faint summer air playing in the tassels of the birches, and all above the glowing brown and purple moor the heat twinkled and trembled aromatic of thyme and bog myrtle and juniper.
Lily clambered down the bank and found a shady nook fringed about with stunted birch and ferns, and there she resigned herself to knitting and to thronging thoughts suggested by what the young minister had said.
Macpherson, meanwhile, and Tom had established themselves to their entire satisfaction on two large boulders in mid stream, and abandoned themselves to the “sport” of waiting for the fishes.