There was some excuse for his refusal to face a struggle, for in the sunshiny days which followed, Nature herself held high holiday, and the most prosaic might well have found it impossible to avoid falling in with her gracious mood. The heather-flush was beginning to creep over the curves of moor, the rowan berries ripened under the sun's kiss, the juicy guienne cherries purpled the children's mouths, and the oat fields hid their poverty in a cloak of golden marigold. Down in the shady nooks the stately foxgloves still lingered, while on the sunniest spots the bracken was gathering the sun-gold into its delicate tracery against the coming gloom of winter. Such times come rarely; times when it is possible to forget the world of toil and trouble, of sin, sorrow, and shame, which lies beyond the circle of the everlasting hills; times when one is content to let life slip past, without counting its pulse-beat; times when one seems to enter in spirit with that divine rest, because the whole world seems good in our eyes.

Paul, dulled as he was by world-tarnish, felt the charm; Marjory, fresh from her sober youth, yielded to it gladly. Will Cameron, with the hay safe housed and harvest secure in the future, said the weather was too good for farming, and gave himself a holiday, and even Mr. Gillespie, free from inspection anxieties, and rejoicing in the Bishop's praise, fell back for a while on college sermons, and studied future ones in stones and running brooks. Only Mrs. Cameron, despising the heat, bustled from kitchen to store-room, from store-room to dairy, indignant over the irregular meals, and the still more irregular milk. It was enough, she said, to turn that of human kindness sour to have charge of five Ayrshires and two Jerseys in such weather, with an English cook coming, or a Frenchman maybe--the laird was equal to that iniquity--who would use crocks on crocks of powdered butter. She knew them! graceless, godless creatures, and Will, instead of wandering like a tinkler about the place, should be at the markets buying pigs, to eat up the sinful waste of good victuals which would begin ere long at the Big House. It was very well of William to smile, and for the laird to say he didn't mind; but what would Lady George say to the cook? And how did William expect to supply the Big House as it should be supplied, when every crofter body was asking one and eightpence a pound for butter she wouldn't look at? And it all trysted, every pound of it, to the English folk over at the Forest, who were coming down like a flight of locusts, devouring the land with pipers and bad whiskey, and a set of idle, pasty-faced, meat-eating English maids, ruining the country side with bad examples! There would have to be a judgment, nothing less, when Sheenach--barefooted Sheenach from the blackest hut on the property--Marjory would mind it, seeing that she held it to be a disgrace to a Christian landholder--set her up for new-fangled notions indeed!--had actually spoken to her, Mrs. Cameron, about beer-money! The kitchen girl over at the Forest, forsooth, got it, and three shillings a week for washings. Heard one ever the like! a barefoot lass that had not spent three shillings on washings since she was born, and would have to look to it for white robes in the future. And Mistress Mackenzie at the ferry house saying calmly that her prices would be doubled from the 10th August.

"It is too true, mother," Will would say consolingly. "I'd like to see the Commission have its way, and destroy the Forests altogether, if only to teach the people what it would mean. But there! parcel post is only twopence a pound, and we can get butter from Devonshire. They pay high rents there, you know, so they can afford to sell produce cheaper." But even this paradox would not soothe the old lady's ire, and the three idlers would escape from the butter-problem into the wilderness of beauty beyond the fat pastures which fed the dairy; in so doing, no doubt, following the example of the offending English folk, who do not care to trouble their holiday with thoughts of the dishonesty and greed they foster and encourage.

Many a tramp had these three over hill and dale. Sometimes climbing the boulder-strewn heights whence sea and land showed like a map; more often lingering by the river lazily, as it made its way through the grassy uplands in a series of foamy leaps and oily pauses. For here the sea-trout were to be beguiled by patience; if not by that, then by the red-tailed fly which Will used with the consummate skill of the real pot-fisher. Paul, on the other hand, beset by lingering prejudice, would lounge on the bank intermittently, offering the rod to Marjory in order to bring him luck; while she, engaged in collecting a perfect herbarium, would deprecate her own past skill in the Long Pool.

"And the admirable underhand cast was a chance also?" he retorted drily. "Really, Miss Carmichael, my modesty is catching."

Marjory laughed. "Oh, no! I learnt that from Will. I never could make out whither he went on Sundays, till one day I came upon him in that little strip of pasture in the middle of the larch plantation, flicking at dandelions with his ten-foot rod. Then he confessed that it was his usual occupation of a Sabbath afternoon, because it was so deadly dull with nothing to do at home. So after that I flicked, too. We used to do it against each other for hours, didn't we, Will?"

"Ten for a dandie, twenty for a daisy, fifty for a bumble-bee," murmured Will from under his tilted hat, as he lay on the grass.

"An instance of the deceit which the irrational worship of the Sabbath is apt to produce," remarked the Reverend James Gillespie, whose conscience invariably assailed him when he had not made a professional remark for some time.

"It is so refreshing to hear you accuse Miss Carmichael," said Paul, gravely. "Deceit is a mortal sin, isn't it, Mr. Gillespie?"

The Reverend James hesitated. He looked sorely out of place amid the wilderness in his black garments, with Paul in his loose Indian suits, and Will guiltless of coat and waistcoat.

"Deceit, cheating--whoever doth wickedly, etc.--generally comes under common theft--non-bailable," murmured the tilted hat softly; for Will, in his youth, had studied law.

"I congratulate you, Miss Carmichael," said Paul, still gravely, "on having attained the position of a real criminal. I have a sneaking admiration for them."

"Why?"

"Because they have done--what I have been afraid to do!"

So the day would slip by in idle talk and idler work, until the lengthening shadows warned them they were far from home, and Will would grow restless over the prospect of dinner versus the tea, with which he had more than once been put off on occasions of gross irregularity. While Paul would boast of his freedom from all control, or offer to stand in the breach by begging a meal at the Lodge; since even Mrs. Cameron's tongue softened when it spoke to the laird, and a vein of humour ran through her blame.

"It's clean reediklous, Gleneira," she would say. "Here it is gone ten, and supper was bidden at eight. An' if you expec' me, a Christian woman, to tell Kursty that my son is even as them who mocked Elijah, or that it was I that made a mistake, you're just wrong. An' a' for a wheen trouties, that's no good for kipper or for anything but to cocker yourselves up wi' at breakfast, instead of being contented with good porridge, as your fathers were. But there! we ken find that Esau sold his birthright for a mess o' pottage."

"And I don't wonder at it," Paul would reply gravely; "if he was half so hungry as I am. How much was it, Cameron, that the hook-and-eye man offered me for Gleneira? A man must eat, you know."

Whereupon the old lady would remark that, as she at least knew her duty, his father's son should never lack bread in her house, and so bustle away good-humouredly to hurry on supper. The unpunctuality was not, however, always their fault; and on one occasion followed on an incident which had a curious effect in still further softening Marjory's judgment on handsome, idle, kindly Paul, and introducing that vein of pity, which, in women of her type, seems an almost necessary ingredient of affection. It may be only a triviality, the half-humorous despair of a buttonless shirt, the possibility of dirty tablecloths, or it may go further into uncared-for sickness and loneliness, but the thought of personal discomfort to a man whom she likes is always grievous to women who have not been educated out of their housewifely instincts.

It came about in this wise. There was a certain Loch of the Fairies which, despite its great beauty, Marjory had seldom seen, for this reason. It lay hidden in the highest corries of the deer forest, accessible only by the burn watering the sheltered glen which, from time immemorial, had been the sanctuary; and not even for Marjory would old John Macpherson disturb his deer, or allow them to be disturbed. But Paul thought differently when he found that the girl's face brightened at the idea of an excursion thither; for, to him, the nearest pleasure was invariably the best.

"As well be hung for a sheep as a lamb," he said, with a laugh. "We will start early and make a day of it. And I'll ask Gillespie to come. He is always telling cock-and-bull stories about the big fish there, so we will set him to catch one. I never did."

And Will Cameron agreed also, saying he would take the opportunity to meet the forest keeper on the march, and settle the position of a new fence to keep the hinds from straying. Only old John shook his head, with mutterings regarding future sport and old traditions.

"As if that were not worth all the sport in the world," said Paul, almost exultantly, as, climbing the last bracken-set knoll, and leaving the last Scotch fir hanging over a wild leap of the burn, they filed past a sheer bluff, and saw in front of them a long, narrow, almost level glen, through which the stream slid in alternate reaches and foaming falls. On either side almost inaccessible cliffs; in front of them, cutting the blue sky clearly, a serrated wall of rock closing up the valley. Great sharp-edged fragments from the heights above lay strewn among the sweeping stretches of heather, whence a brood of grouse rose, blundering to the anxious cackle of the hen.

"There they are," said Will, from force of habit in a whisper, "up on the higher pasture. I thought they would be; so we shan't disturb them a bit if we keep to the burn."

Marjory, shading her eyes from the sun, stood looking on one of the prettiest sights in the world; a herd of red deer dotted over a hill slope, or seen outlined against the horizon line. Paul, from sheer habit also, had slipped to the ground, and had his glass on them. "Splendid royal to the left, Cameron--wonder if we shall get him this year--and, by George, there's the old crooked horn! I remember, Miss Carmichael, trying to put a bullet into him--well, we won't say how many years ago."

"What a slaughterhouse a man's memory must be," remarked Marjory, with her head in the air.

"Not in this case, at any rate," retorted Paul. "Sometimes I am merciful--or miss; which answers the purpose quite as well." As he spoke the memory of Jeanie Duncan rose quite causelessly to his mind, and he started to his feet impatiently; for somehow little Paul's existence had taken the bloom off his self-complacency in regard to that episode.

"Now for the Pixie's loch," he cried gaily. "The ladies have it all their own way there in destruction, if tales be true. I wonder which of us three unfortunate males she will choose as her victim to-day?"

Marjory, looking down as they crested the last boulder-strewn rise on the almost black and oily sheet of water in the crater-like cup of the corrie, felt that she did not wonder at the legends which had gathered round the spot. The very perfection of its loneliness, its beauty, marked it as a thing apart from the more familiar charm of the world around it. There seemed scarce foothold for a goat on those pillared cliffs which sank sheer into the dark water, and the streak or two of snow lingering still in a northern recess marked, she felt sure, some deep crevasse hidden from sight by the innocent-looking mantle of white. Nor could one judge of the depth of the lake by the jagged points of rocks which rose here and there from the surface of the water, for, as she stood, she leant against a fragment of some earlier world, which looked as if it must have fallen from the sky, since the vacant place left by such a huge avalanche must have remained visible for ever in the rocks above. So those out yonder might go down and down, forming vast caves where the Pixie might hold her court of drowned, dead men. She turned to look at Paul suddenly, apprehensively; perhaps because, even in her innocence, she recognised instinctively that there, with all its gifts, with all its charm, lay the nature to which the syren's song is irresistible. But he, stopping on the brink to dip his hand into the water, was looking back at her with a laugh.

"By Jove!" he said, "isn't it cold? Enough to give anyone the shivers."

As he spoke, far out on the glassy glint of water came a speck of stronger light, widening to a circle, widening, widening ever, in softening ripples.

"There! I told you so!" cried the Reverend James, excitedly; "a five-pounder at least!" After which, naturally, there was no time for sentiment, no time for anything but an unconfessed race as to which of the three should have his fly on the water first. Marjory, left to her own devices, wandered as far as she could round the level edge, which to the south lay between the lake and the cliff, until she came to the moss-clad moraine, through which the water found its way to new life in the first long leap of the burn below; for the loch itself was fed by unseen springs. She could hear the stream beneath her feet tinkling musically, and gurgling softly, as if laughing at something it had left behind, or something it was going to meet; and the sound oppressed her vaguely. Here, in an angle of sand, stood a half-ruined boat-house, and within it a boat painted gaily, yet with an air of disuse about it which made Marjory go inside and look at it more closely. It seemed sound enough, and yet, as she wandered on, she hoped that the fishers might not be tempted to use it out on those unknown depths. Then, coming on a great bank of dewberries, she sank down into the yielding heather and gave herself up to enjoyment, finally stretching herself at long length on the springy softness, and watching the lake through her half-closed eyelids. Suddenly, with a smile, she began to sing, and then as suddenly ceased. Cliffs could give back an echo, certainly, but not so clear an one as the tenor tone which followed close on that first phrase of the "Lorelei." An instant after Paul's figure showed round a rock below, busily engaged with a swishing trout rod.

"Die schÖnste MÄdchen sitzet Dort oben wunderbar."