"Very fine, old girl," he said, "but you need a bath, too." So he rang and sent for some butter, dabbed a little on the cat’s nose; and in ten seconds she had begun a thorough and minute toilet, greatly to Cleland’s edification. "Keep it up," he said, much interested, watching the pink tongue travelling over the fur, and the velvet paw scrubbing away industriously. "Good old cat! Go to it! Take the whole course—massage, shampoo, manicure, whiskers ironed! By Jove, you’re coming out brand new!" The cat paused to blink at him, sniff for a moment some faint perfume of distant cooking, unnoticed by his less delicate nostrils, then she settled down to the business in hand. And when a cat does that she feels that she is entirely at home. Not until a maid announced dinner did the two girls appear, both arrayed in that filmy and dainty flyaway apparel suitable only to youth and freshness. "We had naps," remarked Stephanie shamelessly, and with a slightly malicious humour in her smile, for she knew that Cleland had expected her to return for the ten-minutes’ gossip she had suggested. He shrugged: "You should see your cat! She’s polished within an inch of her life——" A loud mew by his chair announced the regenerated animal’s advent. Stephanie fed it with odd morsels from time to time, and cautioned the waitress to prepare a banquet for it after dinner. It was still daylight when they strolled out into the garden. The tree-clad eastern ridge was all ruddy in the rays of a declining sun; the river dull silver save in pools where pearl and pink tints tinged the stiller water. Birds were very noisy, robins gallantly attacking a gay carol which they always found impossible to vary or bring to any convincing musical conclusion; song sparrows sweetly monotonous; an exquisite burst of melody from a rose-grosbeak high on a balsam-tip above the stream; the rushing twitter of chimney swifts sweeping by, mounting, fluttering, sheering through the sunset sky. Helen, pausing by the sun-dial, read aloud what was chiselled there, black with encrusted lichens. "Who wrote this?" she asked curiously. "Some bandit of the back-woods, some wilderness fur trader or ruthless forest runner—with murder on his soul, perhaps. I don’t remember now. But my father made a note of the story." She read the straggling lines again, slowly: "But for ye Sunne no one would heed Me— A senseless Stone; But for ye Sunne no one could rede Me Save God alone. I and my comrade Sunne, together, Print here ye hours In praise of Love and pleasant weather And Youth and flowers." "How odd and quaint," she mused, "—and what straggling, primitive, illiterate letters these are, chiselled here in this black basalt. Fancy that gaunt, grim, buck-skinned runner emerging from the wilderness into this solitary settlement, finding shelter and refreshment; and, in his brief hour of rest and idleness, labouring to leave his record on this old stone!"