MacGibbon shrugged his shoulders. “If you did I forgot,” said he. “It never struck me. A soger? Oh, very well. It is in your family: your influence will be useful.” And he changed the subject. At the very moment that thus they discussed him, Gilian, a truant from school, which now claimed his attention, as Brooks sorrowfully said, “when he had nothing else to do and nowhere else to go,” was on an excursion to the Waterfoot, where the Duglas in a sandy delta unravels at the end into numerous lesser streams, like the tip of a knotless fishing-line. It was a place for which he had an exceeding fondness. For here in the hot days of summer there was a most rare seclusion. No living thing shared the visible land with him except the sea-birds, the white-bellied, the clean and wholesome and free, talking like children among the weeds or in their swooping essays overhead. A place of islets and creeks, where the mud lay golden below the river’s peaty flow; he had but to shut his eyes for a little and look upon it lazily, and within him rose the whole charm and glamour of oceans and isles. Swimming in the briny deeps that washed the rocks, he felt in that solitude so sufficient, so much in harmony with the spirit of the place, its rumination, its content, its free and happy birds, as if he were Ellar in the fairy tale. The tide caressed; it put its arms round him; it laughed in the sunshine and kissed him shyly at the lips. Into the swooping concourse of the birds he would send, thus swimming, his brotherly halloo. They called back; they were not afraid, they need not be--he loved them. To-day he had come down to the Waterfoot almost unknowing where he walked. Though the woods were bare there was the look of warmth in their brown and purple depths; only on the upper hills did the snow lie in patches. Great piles of trunks, the trunks of old fir and oak, lay above high-water mark. He turned instinctively to look for the ship they were waiting for, and behind him, labouring at a slant against the wind, was the _Jean_ coming from the town to pick her cargo from this narrow estuary. He was plucked at the heart by a violent wish to stay. At the poop he could see Black Duncan, and the seaman’s histories, the seaman’s fables all came into his mind again, and the sea was the very highway of content. The ship was all alone upon the water, not even the tan of a fisher’s lug-sail broke the blue. A bracing heartening air blew from French Foreland And as he was looking spellbound upon the little vessel coming into the mouth of the river, he was startled by a strain of music. It floated, a rumour angelic, upon the air, coming whence he could not guess--surely not from the vessel where Black Duncan and two others held the deck alone?