“Don’t you trouble,” he said, instantly.  “You leave me to myself.  I like to wander about and find out my surroundings.  I shall go down to the river, to begin with; I saw some picturesque bits higher up when we were coming along.”

“You’ll almost certainly find Honnor Cunyngham there,” said Miss Lestrange.  “I suppose she has gone storking, as usual.”

“Stalking?” said he, in some amazement.

“No, no—­storking, as I call it.  She haunts the side of the river like a crane or a heron,” said the red-haired damsel.  “I think she would rather land a salmon than go to heaven.”

“Georgie,” said the young matron, severely, “you are not likely ever to do either; so you needn’t be spiteful.  Come away and get to work.  Mr. Moore, we dine at eight; and, if you are anywhere up or down the strath, you’ll hear the bell over the stables rung at seven, and then at half-past.”

So they went off and left him; and he was not displeased; he passed out by the front door, lit a cigar, and strolled down towards the banks of the Aivron.  It was a bright and sweet-aired afternoon; he was glad to be at the end of his journey; and this was a very charming, if somewhat lonely, stretch of country in which he now found himself.  The wide river, the steep hillside beyond hanging in foliage, the valley narrowing in among rocks and then leading away up to those far solitudes of moorland and heather, broken only here and there by a single pine—­all these features of the landscape seemed so clear and fine in color; there was no intervening haze; everything was vivid and singularly distinct, and yet aerial and harmonious and retiring of hue.  But of course it was the stream—­with its glancing lights, its living change and motion, its murmuring, varying voice—­that was the chief attraction; and he wandered on by the side of it, noting here and there the long, rippling shallows where the sun struck golden on the sand beneath, watching the oily swirls of the deep black-brown pools as if at any moment he expected to see a salmon leap into the air, and not even uninterested in the calm eddies on the other side, where the smooth water mirrored the yellow-green bank and the bushes and the overhanging birch-trees.  He sat down for a while, listening absently to this continuous, soothing murmur, perhaps thinking of the roar of the great city he had left.  He was quite content to be alone; he did not even want Maurice Mangan to be discoursing to him—­in those seasons of calm in which questions, long unanswered, perhaps never to be answered, will arise.

Then he rose and went on again, for, from the high-road along which he had driven, he had caught a glimpse of a wilder part of the glen, where the river seemed to come tumbling down a rocky chasm, with some huge boulders in mid-channel; and even now he could hear the distant, muffled roar of the waters.  But all of a sudden he stopped.  Away along there, and keeping guard (like a stork, as Miss Georgie Lestrange