almost purple where they came against the paler azure of the sky. The boys climbed to the flat top of the highest boulder, where the gorse-bushes, some still darkly green, some breaking into yellow flame, thrust their strong clumps from the rocky soil to stretch in a level sea, inset with tracts of heath and bracken, for miles around. The whole arc of the sky, the whole circle of the world's rim, lay bare to the eye, infinitely varied by clouds and cloud-shadows, by pasture and arable, dark patches of woods and pallor of pools, by the lambent burnish of the west and the soft purpling of the east, even by differing weathers--here great shafts of sunlight, there the blurred column of a distant shower, or the faint smear, like a bruise upon the horizon, of a low-hanging mist. Killigrew lay on his stomach and gazed his fill, his thin nostrils dilating rather like a rabbit's, as they always did if he were moved by anything--a trick which, with his light eyelashes, had won for him the name of "Bunny." Ishmael threw himself on his back and lay staring up at the sky as it was slowly drawn past overhead, till with hard gazing the whole world seemed spinning round him and the plummet of his sight was drowned in the shifting heights that seemed to his reeling senses bottomless depths. When Killigrew spoke he plucked his eyes from their fixed stare with what was a physical effort and turned them giddily on to the other boy's usually pale face, now copper-pink in the warm light. "Why d'you suppose she don't like Doughty?" asked Killigrew. "I dunno ...; he is rather a swine, anyway." "Yes, but how does she know that?" This was a poser, and Ishmael failed at an answer beyond a feeble "Oh, well, because he is." "If he's been a cad to her--" muttered Killigrew, vengefully. "I don't know how he can have been; she's only seen him with us. But I don't know what you'd do about it if he had; you can't lick him; he's twice your size and weight." "Would you never fight unless you were sure of winning?" demanded Killigrew scornfully. Ishmael thought a minute. "I think it is that I never fight until I'm sure of winning," he said at last; "if I found I wasn't strong enough I wouldn't go in and be beaten; I'd train hard till I was and then fight." "But that might take ages and you'd forget what you wanted to fight the chap about." "I don't think I'd forget, if I'd wanted to fight him. I might, though, I suppose...." "You're all wrong, you know," opined Killigrew; "'tisn't the winning that really matters ... sounds silly, but I don't know how to explain it." "Sounds like something the Parson would say--my Parson," said Ishmael on one of his flashes of intuition; and then they both laughed, for Killigrew was one of those rare creatures, a born pagan--or rather heathen, which is not quite the same thing. The pagan has beliefs of his own; the true heathen denies the need for any, through sheer lack of interest.