Ian in imagination saw it, too.  They sat, chin on knees, upon the moorside above the Kelpie’s Pool.  The water was faintly crisped, the reeds and willow boughs just stirred.

“But the kelpie—­did you ever see that?”

“Sometimes it is seen as a water-horse, sometimes as a demon.  I never saw anything like that but once.  I never told any one about it.  It may have been just one of those willows, after all.  But I thought I saw a woman.”

“Go on!”

“There was a great mist that day and it was hard to see.  Sometimes you could not see—­it was just rolling waves of gray.  So I stumbled down, and I was in the rushes before I knew that I had come to them.  It was spring and the pool was full, and the water plashed and came over my foot.  It was like something holding my ankles....  And then I saw her—­if it was not the willow.  She was like a fair woman with dark hair unsnooded.  She looked at me as though she would mock me, and I thought she laughed—­and then the mist rolled down and over, and I could not see the hills nor the water nor scarce the reeds I was in.  So I lifted my feet from the sucking water and got away....  I do not know if it was the kelpie’s daughter or the willow—­but if it was the willow it could look like a human—­or an unhuman—­body!”

Ian gazed at the pool.  He had many advantages over Alexander, he knew, but the latter had this curious daring.  He did more things with himself and of himself than did he, Ian.  There was that in Ian that did not like this, that was jealous of being surpassed.  And there was that in Ian that would not directly display this feeling, that would provide it, indeed, with all kinds of masks, but would, with certainty, act from that spurring, though intricate enough might be the path between the stimulus and the act.

“It is deep?”

“Aye.  Almost bottomless, you would think, and cold as winter.”

“Let us go swimming.”

“The day’s getting late and it’s growing cold.  However, if you want to—­”

Ian did not greatly want to.  But if Alexander could be so indifferent, he could be determined and ardent.  “What’s a little mirk and cold?  I want to say I’ve swum in it.”  He began to unbutton his waistcoat.

They stripped, left their clothes in the stone’s keeping, and ran down the moorside.  The light played over their bodies, unblemished, smooth, and healthfully colored, clean-lined and rightly spare.  They had beautiful postures and movements when they stood, when they ran; a youthful and austere grace as of Spartan youth plunging down to the icy Eurotas.  The earth around lay as stripped as they; the naked, ineffable blue ether held them as it did all things; the wandering air broke against them in invisible surf.  They ran down the long slope of the moor, parted the reeds, and dived to meet their own reflections.  The water was most truly deep and cold.  They struck out, they swam to the middle of the pool, they turned upon their backs and looked up to the blue zenith, then, turning again, with strong arm strokes they sent the wave over each other.  They rounded the pool under the twisted willows, beside the shaking reeds; they swam across and across.