She was used to wildness, and loved it. Reared in one of the wildest tracts of wild Ireland, she had delighted to go forth on solitary rambles, with trout rod and creel, more than ankle deep in soft bog soil, tramping laboriously to her field of action in high mountain lough, where the shrieking gust of a squall every half hour or so drove her to refuge beneath some great rock, what time the trout sulked, only to rise fast and furious when the rain squall had passed, and the raven croaked from the shining wet crags. And this solemn blue vista, stretching away in its vastness, formed a contrast indeed to the stormy glistening grandeur of her former mountain home; here with its hot, sub-tropical steaminess; yet there was that in common between both of them--that both were the wilds. In the dreaminess of her reverie she started suddenly. The loud neighing of a horse, together with the violent flapping of an empty saddle as the animal shook himself, caused a sudden inroad upon her meditations that produced that effect. There, hitched to a bush, stood a horse, one moreover that she seemed to recognise. Yes, it was the large, high-withered roan that Lamont had ridden when, at her urgent request, he had entered for the tent-pegging competition and--had not won. In a moment Clare's meditations, dreamy and otherwise, were scattered to the winds. There was the horse, but--where was its owner? A strange inclination--impulse, rather--to get away, to return before he should discover her presence, came upon her. Yet--why? Why on earth--why? But whatever the ground for such aspirations they were not to be fulfilled, for at that moment a voice hailed her--an astonished voice. "Why, Miss Vidal, good morning. Who in the world would have dreamed of meeting you up here?" "I might say the same, Mr Lamont. I thought I would take a bit of a stroll while all Gandela was sleeping off last night's orgies. Strange, but I've never been up here. I suppose it is because the climb rather froze Lucy off--and I didn't bother to come alone. Do you know I think this country makes people very lazy." "Oh yes. There's a steaminess about it that gets on to one's energies somehow. It'll infect you too when you've been out here a little longer." "Now don't talk down to me, Mr Lamont. I feel quite an old pioneer. I came up here during the war, you know." "Yes, yes. Just over two years ago." "Well, you needn't be so supercilious. Especially as you don't seem to have been over-successful yourself this morning." "Successful? Oh, I see," following her glance to the magazine rifle he carried. "No. Game is scarce since the rinderpest, and especially right near Gandela, like this." "Look what I found just now, in the bush, before I got to the top here," she said. "It must be some sort of native ornament." She held out to him two white cow-tails, fastened to a kind of bracelet of twisted sinew. "Yes, it is. Very much of a native ornament."