"I'll tell you what," cried Ned suddenly, his face showing a half scornful amusement. "Let Fate decide which of us needs money most!" He took out a pocketbook as he spoke, and withdrew from it a sheaf of bank notes. "There's a hundred here, and I don't want it--that"--he pointed to the cash--"will carry me through for a week, so my namesake and I could start fair together for a holiday--if he chooses. I'll leave this, therefore, on deposit! There is a convenient cleft in the rock over there, and my tobacco-pouch will keep out the damp----" He produced the latter also, and began leisurely to exchange contents, while the others gasped---- "But, sir, you can never mean," began the Reverend Morris Pugh, finding his voice first--"To leave money here, so close to the road!--think of the temptation!" "To us, certainly," interrupted Ned dryly, "but to no one else. It is ours to take when we think the world--that is, of course, ourselves--wants it--but mind you--we are to say nothing about the taking to any one else in the world. Of course, we agree to treat it as--let us say, a sovereign remedy; therefore we're to use it only to--to cure what we can't cure without it." "Or think we can't cure," amended Peter Ramsay with twinkling eyes, "my prescriptions are personal matters between me and my conscience. The idea is fetching, an unappropriated balance----" "Hardly unappropriated," remarked Ned caustically, "it is apparently hypothecated--as you Scotch call it, doctor--to philanthropy, for I suppose charity mustn't begin at home." "Why not?" put in Ned. "There's really no limitation of object or time. Any of us may withdraw the deposit to-morrow without notice to any one, if he possess a solid conviction that--that he can't do without it? Do you all agree?" There was a pause. "It's d--d rot," said Ted Cruttenden at last sulkily, "but on those conditions I agree." The Reverend Morris Pugh looked abstractedly over the golden haze in which the whole world was hidden. "Money is the root of all evil," he began. "Bosh!" interrupted Dr. Ramsay, springing to his feet. "I'm game! I shall take that money, if some of you aren't too previous, for the first real necessity----" Ned Cruttenden sprang to his feet also, and laughed. "So will I, if I can only make up my mind as to what constitutes a 'real necessity.'" The two stood challenging each other, then the red-brown eyes under the shaggy bronze-red eyebrows softened. "Not much, I'll allow; very often bare life." Ned stooped to secrete the tobacco-pouch murmuring, "_Il faut vivre! Pour moi je n'en vois pas la necessité!_" Then he looked up. "There it is, gentlemen, very much at your disposal. And now, namesake, we can start fair--for our walk to the first blacksmith's shop anyhow." Five minutes afterwards the golden haze had usurped even the still unrippled pool and the cleft in the rock, while the four young men on the downward path were lost to view utterly.