“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. Tom, conscious at first of Macpherson’s experienced eye, contrived to be very patient for half an hour; but then he could no longer help thinking that the fishes were obstinate, or the spot unfavorable, or the sun too hot and bright, or the air too still, or the fly—probably the fly was not the right kind; at any rate, a change of position must no longer be deferred. By judicious tacking from boulder to boulder, and then across a low shingle island where stunted alder scrub made a shelter for the oyster-catchers, and tufts of saxifrage and stonecrop grew, he arrived at a more likely place, and tried again. Still it was evident that the fishes did not see the matter from his point of view. He very soon wearied of his new position and cast about for a better. He saw a big round boulder out in the very middle of the broadest part of the stream, and was seized with all a boy’s longing to be on it, sport or no sport. To long for a thing, with Tom Echalaz, was as a rule to attain it rather sooner than later, and he at once began making his way out with plenty of pluck and very little caution, and finally landed with his rod, much wetter than he cared to notice, and tried again. He turned presently, when even this new delight was beginning to pall, to see what Macpherson was doing. Then he fancied he heard thunder, and stood motionless to listen. His eyes were fixed on the brown laughing water, flowing so softly over the stones below, that caught the sun and shadow through it and looked like broken gold amongst the soft brown of the bottom; the pebbly clatter of the shallow waterfall beyond was in his ears. This was the moment, the sight, the sound that remained indelibly fixed in his memory afterwards—the sultry stillness, and the slumbrous babble and murmur that only made it seem more still.