And what had Lionel to say for himself, now that he had been admitted into this secret haunt of the river-maiden?  Well, if the truth must be told, he was considerably embarrassed.  For one thing, he was mortally afraid that she might suddenly bethink herself of Paul and Virginia, and be annoyed by a situation which was certainly none of his contriving.  What was still worse, she might be amused!  He could not get it out of his head that there was something dangerously, almost ludicrously, conventional in the whole position; it seemed to suggest some foolish, old-fashioned, sentimental picture.  The solitary dell, and the two figures; why, he felt as if blue ribbons were beginning to sprout at his knees; and he feared to turn to his companion lest he should find her with a crook and a kirtle.  He did not ask himself why wretched reminiscences of theatrical tradition should thrust themselves upon him here in the lonely wilds of Ross-shire; what he dreaded was that some such idea might occur to her and provoke her resentment—­what was still more ghastly, it might make her laugh!

Honnor Cunyngham, for her part, was quietly and contentedly munching her sandwiches of salmon and vinegared lettuce-leaf; and no such idle town-fancies were troubling her.  Probably she was thinking that the hot sunlight after the shower made everything intensely vivid—­the silver-stemmed birches in this picturesque little dell rising gracefully into the keen blue of the sky; the diamond-starred bracken and grass shining after the wet; the clear, tea-brown water at her feet glancing in the sun; the green and bronze stones and pebbles showing clear at the bottom of the pellucid brook as it chased and danced on its way down to the Geinig.  And whatever else she may have been thinking of, she was almost certainly conscious that vinegared lettuce-leaf in a sandwich was a vast improvement.

“Do you come here often?” he said, at length.

“It is my favorite nook,” she made answer.

“I confess that I feel horribly like an interloper,” he remarked, hesitatingly.  “I feel as if I—­as if I had no right to be here—­as if I were invading a sacred retreat—­” and there he stopped; for he would have liked to add, “the sacred retreat of a sylvan goddess or a nymph of the stream,” but that he somehow felt that fantastic imagery of that kind would hardly be appropriate.

“You had more need of the shelter than I,” said this extremely matter-of-fact young person, “for you had no waterproof, and I had.  Come, if you have finished, shall we go up to the Top Pool?—­I want you to have a cast over that, for it is an experience; and, though the sun is out, it won’t much matter; there is always such a boiling and surging in that caldron.”