The bag mounted up steadily; for the afternoon, despite the threats of the morning, remained fine and clear and still; the birds lay close, and the two outside guns were skilful performers.  As for Lionel, he had now acquired a certain confidence; he took no shame that he reserved for himself the easy shots; the nasty ones he could safely leave to his companions.  At last, as they came in sight of a lovely little tarn lying under a distant hillock, and could descry two small dots floating on the surface of the water, Sir Hugh said to his head keeper,

“See here, Roderick, are those duck or mergansers?”

The keeper took a long look before he made reply.

“I’m not sure, Sir Hugh, but I am thinking they are mergansers, for I was seeing two or three lately.”

“Very well, call in the dogs.  I’m going to sit down and have a pipe.  I suppose you’ll do the same, Mr. Moore—­though I must say this for you that you can walk.  You have the advantage of youth, and you haven’t as much to carry as I have.  Well, I propose we have a few minutes’ rest? and we will occupy ourselves in watching Waveney stalk those mergansers.  There’s a job for you, Waveney.  They are the most detestable birds alive to have near a forest or a salmon-stream.”

“Why, what harm can they do to the salmon?” Lionel asked, as he saw Captain Waveney at once change the cartridges in his gun for No. 4’s and set off down the hillside.

“They snap up the parr, of course,” said his heavy-shouldered host, as he drew out a wooden pipe and a pouch of black Cavendish, “but that isn’t the worst:  they disturb the pools most abominably—­swimming about under water they frighten the salmon out of their senses.  But when you get them about a deer-forest they are a still more intolerable nuisance; you are never safe; just as you are getting up to the stag, creeping along the course of a burn, perhaps, bang! goes one of those brutes like a sky-rocket, and the whole herd are instantly on the alert.  Oh, that’s a job old Waveney likes well enough; and it will give the dogs a rest as well as ourselves.”

By this time the stalker had got out of sight.  He was making a considerable detour, so as to get round by the back of the hillock unobserved; and when he came into view again, he was on the other side of the valley.  The mergansers, if they were mergansers, were still swimming about unsuspectingly, though sometimes at a considerable distance apart.

“Does Miss Cunyngham shoot as well as fish?” Lionel ventured to ask.

“She has tried it,” her brother said, as he called up Roderick and gave him a dram out of his capacious flask.  “And I think she might shoot very well, but she doesn’t care about it.  It is too violent, she says.  The sudden bang disturbs the charm of the scenery—­something of that kind—­I’m not up in these things; but she’s an odd kind of girl.  Tremendously fond of quietude and solitude; we’ve