When she was six her father began to take her out with him at the time when he exercised the puppies. She and the puppies would run about together and by the same word be called to heel. She found that she could do most of the things that they did. Once, on a summer day when two of them had conscientiously frightened a water-rat out of its hole on the margin of the lake, Gabrielle, who was far ahead of her father and hot with running, plunged in after them. She got her mouth full of water, and thought she was drowning, and Jocelyn, frightened for her life, ran in after her and rescued her with the water up to his neck. "Now that you're here," he said, "you'd better learn to swim." And he made her, then and there, bringing her back to Biddy Joyce like a small drowned cat, with her black hair clinging close to her head. It was a great achievement, and since Biddy could not, for the moment, produce any mythological terror in the nature of a Loreley better than a pike that preyed on swimmers, Gabrielle would often go down to the lake secretly in the middle of a summer morning, and strip off her clothes and float on her back in the sunshine. She must have looked a strange little thing with her long white legs, her smooth black hair, her deep violet eyes, and her red lips; for she had this amazing combination of features that you will sometimes find in the far West. She did not get them from her mother or from Jocelyn, both of whom were blond Saxons. I suppose they came to her through the blood of some Irishwoman whom a dead Hewish had married perhaps a hundred years before. While Biddy Joyce instructed her in oaths and legend, and her father taught her to ride, to swim, to shoot and to fish, her moral and literal education were entrusted to Mr. Considine. Physically Mr. Considine was of a type that does not change much with the passage of time. When first he came to Roscarna, a couple of years before Gabrielle was born, he was a young man of twenty. How he came to be chosen for the cure of Clonderriff I do not know, unless he were in some way connected with the Parker family. He was a Wiltshireman, tall, sandy-haired, with a long face and a square jaw to which he gave an air of determination by constantly gritting his teeth. Gabrielle, as imitative as a starling, began to mimic this habit of his until one day he found himself staring at her, as at a mirror, and told her to stop. She had meant no harm; she didn't even know that she was doing it, but he treated the offence quite seriously.