I gave a little 'hoch!' of disgust. A great freckle-faced lout of a boy--I knew him! I remembered, too, that the Duncans had joined heartily in a scandalised murmur, far-off sounds of which had reached my ears, at the enormity of my bringing play-acting folk to my Highland seraglio. With very few more words I left Mrs. Ellmer, more put out than I cared to show. However, after looking angrily at the rhododendrons in the drive for a little while, I happily remembered that the annual visit of my four oddly-assorted friends was due within a month, and that then I should have something more interesting to occupy my mind than the flirtations of a couple of children. 'And after that,' I said to myself, 'I think I shall set off on my wanderings again for a little while, and the Ellmers can remain here until they, too, are tired of it, and so we shall avoid any wrench over the break-up.' That the break-up must come I knew, and, on the whole, I felt that it had better come early than late--for me, at any rate. I climbed up Craigendarroch next day, and every day for a week after; I never met any one, and every time I was alarmed by the steepness of those rocks to the south, where a poor young fellow who was out fern-hunting fell down the perpendicular cliff one summer's day, and was found a shapeless, lifeless heap four days after on the side of the hill. He was a stranger, and might have lain there till his bones whitened on the rocks and ferns among the young oak-trees, if a couple of Ballater lads had not stumbled upon his body in their Sunday walk, and called out all the village to see the sight. And these made the most of the excitement in a singular way, holding a highly decorous and Presbyterian wake, settling themselves in a business-like manner like a flock of crows on the broken ground around the stone on which the dead man, scarcely more silent and unconcerned than they, held his mournful levee. This incident had already given a tragic interest to the south side of the pretty hill; and although Babiole knew the place well, and was as sure-footed and nimble as one of its native squirrels, I felt anxious every day when there was no answer to my call of 'Ta-ta! Ta-ta!' and was not satisfied until I had made the circuit of the hill, pushed my way through the barriers of uprooted firs with which the gales of early spring had encumbered the hillside on the north, and going on in that direction, came to the bare and almost precipitous slope which forms the southern wall of the Pass of Ballater.