Tying the punt up to the bank, I pulled out my paints and set to work. It was one of those mornings which make one doubt whether any conceivable heaven could really be as attractive as earth. An infinitely faint breeze just stirred the leaves overhead, and only the occasional splash of a fish or the shrill twitter of a bird disturbed the fragrant silence around.
For about an hour I laboured at my picture with commendable industry. But somehow or other I did not make as rapid progress as such diligence deserved. A vision of a girl with bronze hair kept flitting before my eyes in the most elusive and disconcerting fashion. Once I actually found myself murmuring, "Lie down, sir!" apparently in an attempt to analyze the peculiar charm with which these three words seemed to be associated.
For a person of well-regulated mind this was distinctly humiliating. I began to take myself to task. "Because a young woman happens to address a bulldog in your hearing," I inquired, "is that any reason why you should waste an entire morning?"
Getting no reply, I continued with increasing sternness: "You are as bad as George. You are making an idiot of yourself over a red-haired slip of a girl whom you have only seen about three times in your life. Why, if it comes to that, you don't even know her name! Sir, I am disgusted with you."
Relieved by this Johnsonian rebuke, I again turned to my picture, and for twenty minutes or so worked on with unruffled concentration. Then it suddenly occurred to me that I was hungry.
I moved aside my paints, carefully laid down the canvas in the end of the punt, and, pulling out the luncheon-basket from under the seat, began to prepare my frugal but well-earned meal. The tongue, my chef-d'œuvre, was encased in one of those ingenious tins which you open by twisting a key. I was deep in this fascinating process when my ears were assailed by the sudden splash of an approaching craft.
I looked up with a frown. Such an intrusion on my privacy seemed to me to savour of gross impertinence. I had come to regard the Bourne as my private property, which I was magnanimous enough to open to the public cm Saturdays and Sundays. And here was some coarse-grained stranger thrusting his way in at one o'clock on Tuesday afternoon.
"In future," I said to myself, "I shall mine the channel."
Nearer and nearer came that offensive splash, varied by the occasional swish of a parted bush, and the creaking of an indifferently handled punt-pole. Assuming an expression of cold displeasure, I sat up and waited on Fate. At last the nose of a punt thrust itself round the bend, and a moment later the intruder emerged into full view.
In my agitation I dropped the tongue in the butter. It was the bronze-haired girl from Otter's Holt!