Some three days later it happened that this household decided on a sort of picnic known to it as "half-a-mile-off tea." A houseful of able-bodied servants made this festivity, which was exactly what its name implies, easily possible. All the most critical tea-drinker could want had gone before, and the house-party, or most of it, was straggling across the parkland to Fern Hollow, the place appointed. Challis and Judith were accidentally last. A chance left him the only hearer of a voice dropped languidly for the benefit of his ears alone. "Let these noisy people go on in front, Scroop," said its owner to him; and then, in reply to his amused look at hearing himself so addressed, "I knew I should do it in the end, because of the newspaper reviews. Do you mind my calling you Scroop now and then, by accident?" "Nothing can please me better," said he. "Biggest compliment you can pay me!" It started the soul-brush afresh, and he had to settle whether it was to be submission or protest. He fancied he could manage the latter even though he acknowledged the voice, that continued, "Suppose we go by Trout Bend! It's nonsense hurrying. The tea can wait. Or we can have fresh made." This was concession, both in the proposed _tête-à-tête_, and something in the familiarity of treatment, which seemed to savour more of the Hermitage than Grosvenor Square. But it was only the simple vocabulary common to all tea-worlds; they are above class distinctions. "Suppose we do," said Challis. And they did. Trout Bend is a small incident in Geography. But it has a quality in common with--for instance--the Arctic Circle. It is always the same. Its lower segment has the same merry ripple over the same stones, and its upper one spreads to the same pools, that foster here and there each year the very selfsame bulrushes, to all appearance. And in the middle of the best one--the one, that is, that lends itself best to self-deception on the part of the fisherman--the fish that leaped last year, when you were looking at it and wondering how deep it was in the middle, does it again, and doesn't bore you. Because if he did, you wouldn't watch for him a third time. Only then he _doesn't_ do it again, and that does bore you. And where the pools end and the ripples begin are the same infatuated stepping-stones, that think they can bear your weight, and can't. And then you become spell-bound on them as they wobble, and are rescued by extended walking-sticks from either side, and get across quite dry, or only a very little water in one shoe.