He pressed a kiss upon her forehead. He was feeling in love and charity with all men. To wheedle Aunt Freddy into forgiveness was the first outlet that presented itself for the excitement that was consuming him. Larry walked to Mount Music through the Wood of the Ownashee, alone. Miss Coppinger said she disliked the short way across the river by the stepping stones, and preferred to drive the now venerable Tommy round by the road; in her heart, brave as she was, she trusted that Larry would have got through his meeting with Dick before she arrived. Therefore did Larry step along the pebbly path by the river, under the dense canopy of beechen boughs, with, for companions, only the two hound puppies that Bill Kirby did not fail to foist annually upon all amenable friends. These lumbered after Larry's quick foot, with all the engaging absurdity of their kind; tripping over their own enormous feet, chewing outlying portions of one another, as ill-brought-up babies chew their blankets; sitting down abruptly and unpremeditatedly, and watching with deep dubiety the departing form of their escort, as though a sudden and shattering doubt of his identity had paralysed them, until some contrary wind of doctrine blew them into action again, and they hurled themselves upon his trail, filled with the single intention to rush between his legs. Nothing but that instinct of self-preservation that operates independent of the reason, preserved Larry from frequent and violent overthrow. His head was in the clouds; he was abandoning himself to dreams, with the very same headlong enthusiasm that Scandal and Steersman brought to bear upon the problems of existence. He strode past the glade that had been the scene of the Cluhir picnic without so much as a thought of Tishy Mangan. Had you or I reminded him of that brief, yet moving, episode, he would probably have regarded us with wide, bewildered, blue eyes, and asked for details. Then, as memory awakened, he would have laughed delightedly, and said: "Yes! By Jove! So I was! But Georgy cut me out, didn't he?" And he might have added that there had been scores of them since Tishy, he had forgotten half of them--but this, THIS! Larry would then, inevitably, have lapsed into rhapsody, as would be no more than was decent and right in a young man of artistic temperament, and you or I, our malign intention baffled, would have retired in deserved confusion. Old Evans was in the hall as Larry walked in through the open door. He received Larry's hand-shake coldly; the four years that had passed since Larry had seen him had withered and greyed him; Larry, something dashed by the reception, remembered the title given him long ago by Christian--"the many-wintered crow,"--and found satisfaction in deciding that the crow was a scald-crow, and a sour old divil at that; anyhow, Evans had always had a knife into him, so it made no difference.