obscurity of leafy nooks.  On either hand was a wood, thick with undergrowth; great pines, spruces, and larches, red-berried rowans, crowding on the steep sides of the ravine; trees of noble stature, shadowing fern and flower, towering against the sunny blue.  Just below the spot where Piers and Irene rested, a great lichened hazel stretched itself all across the beck; in the upward direction a narrowing vista, filled with every tint of leafage, rose to the brown of the moor and the azure of the sky.  All about grew tall, fruiting grasses, and many a bright flower; clusters of pink willow-weed, patches of yellow ragwort, the perfumed meadowsweet, and, amid bracken and bramble, the purple shining of a great campanula.

On the open moor, the sun blazed with parching heat; here was freshness as of spring, the waft of cool airs, the scent of verdure moistened at the root.

“Once upon a time,” said Otway, when both had been listening to their thoughts, “I fancied myself as unlucky a man as walked the earth.  I’ve got over that.”

Irene did not look at him; she waited for the something else which his voice promised.

“Think of my good fortune in meeting you this afternoon.  If I had gone to the Castle another way, I should have missed you; yet I all but did go by the fields.  And there was nothing I desired so much as to see you somewhere—­by yourself.”

The slight failing of his voice at the end helped Irene to speak collectedly.

“Chance was in my favour, too.  I came down to the beck, hoping I might meet you.”

She saw his hand move, the fingers clutch together.  Before he could say anything, she continued: 

“I want to tell you of an ill-natured story that has reached my ears.  Not to discuss it; I know it is untrue.  Your two brothers—­ do you know that they speak spitefully of you?”

“I didn’t know it.  I don’t think I have given them cause.”

“I am very sure you haven’t.  But I want you to know about it, and I shall tell you the facts.  After the death of my aunt, Mrs. Hannaford, you got from the hands of Daniel Otway a packet of her letters; he bargained with you, and you paid his price, wishing those letters to be seen by my father and my cousin Olga, whose minds they would set at rest.  Now, Daniel Otway is telling people that you never paid the sum you promised him, and that, being in poverty, he vainly applies to you for help.”

She saw his hand grasp a twig that hung near him, and drag it rudely down; she did not look at his face.

“I should have thought,” Piers answered with grave composure, “that nothing Daniel Otway said could concern me.  I see it isn’t so.  It must have troubled you, for you to speak of it.”

“It has; I thought about it.  I rejected it as a falsehood.”

“There’s a double falsehood.  I paid him the price he asked, on the day he asked it, and I have since”—­he checked himself—­“I have not refused him help in his poverty.”