And now it had come to this: that while these came to Llanyglo for a change of air, John Willie Garden, who spent his days among lime and mortar and wheeling-planks and newly dressed stone, frequently turned his back on Llanyglo for precisely the same reason. Once a week or so he was seen to drive past Pritchard's Corner in a light yellow trap at nine o'clock in the morning. He was off to see to another of his father's interests--that "catchment area" far away up in the mountains. He drove eight miles, put up at an inn past which a trout-stream brawled (hardly yet settled from its precipitous plunging cataracts), and then set out on foot up a road that rose one-in-five under a whispering wood, to see the skyline of which you had to throw your head back. It took him an hour of walking to get to his destination--a solitary wooden cabin where the agent lived. The agent had on the whole an easy time of it, for hardly a hundred yards from his cabin door, above the woods now, lay Llyn Delyn, pure looking-glass in the mile long crook of the mountain. An old boat was moored among the sedges at one end, the launching of which on the unbroken surface of that lovely water always seemed to invoke vague judgments, penalties perhaps forborne, but none the less incurred. Here the agent, whose name was Sharpe, fished. John Willie fished with him. Fishing was a good enough way of passing the time, for they were not really doing anything up there. They were merely waiting--waiting for more people to come to Llanyglo, for the Town Hall to rise, for the seat of local administration to be shifted from Porth Neigr, and then for the Waterworks Scheme. They had the water as fast as prevision and Law could make it. They would not drive too hard a bargain with the town. In the meantime they fished, speaking little, noting whether it was the gnat or the cochybondhu that killed, casting so lightly that the boat scarcely rocked. Sometimes, when the amber evening light was clear behind them, so impeccable was the profound mirror below that, while their tweed-clad forms could hardly be distinguished from the hues of the mountain behind, the upside-down shapes beneath them were sharp and dark as the silhouettes in your grandmother's little oval frames. III THE BLANK CHEQUE