“Are you afraid to touch him?” asked Alfred.

“Indeed I am not,” answered Betty.

“Then run your hand gently down the line, slip your fingers in under his gills and lift him over the side carefully.”

“Five pounds,” exclaimed Alfred, when the fish lay at his feet.  “This is the largest black bass I ever caught.  It is pity to take such a beautiful fish out of his element.”

“Let him go, then.  May I?” said Betty.

“No, you have allowed them all to go, even the pickerel which I think ought to be killed.  We will keep this fellow alive, and place him in that nice clear pool over in the fort-yard.”

“I like to watch you play a fish,” said Betty.  “Jonathan always hauls them right out.  You are so skillful.  You let this fish run so far and then you checked him.  Then you gave him a line to go the other way, and no doubt he felt free once more when you stopped him again.”

“You are expressing a sentiment which has been, is, and always will be particularly pleasing to the fair sex, I believe,” observed Alfred, smiling rather grimly as he wound up his line.

“Would you mind being explicit?” she questioned.

Alfred had laughed and was about to answer when the whip-like crack of a rifle came from the hillside.  The echoes of the shot reverberated from hill to hill and were finally lost far down the valley.

“What can that be?” exclaimed Alfred anxiously, recalling Colonel Zane’s odd manner when they were about to leave the house.

“I am not sure, but I think that is my turkey, unless Lew Wetzel happened to miss his aim,” said Betty, laughing.  “And that is such an unprecedented thing that it can hardly be considered.  Turkeys are scarce this season.  Jonathan says the foxes and wolves ate up the broods.  Lew heard this turkey calling and he made little Harry Bennet, who had started out with his gun, stay at home and went after Mr. Gobbler himself.”

“Is that all?  Well, that is nothing to get alarmed about, is it?  I actually had a feeling of fear, or a presentiment, we might say.”

They beached the canoe and spread out the lunch in the shade near the spring.  Alfred threw himself at length upon the grass and Betty sat leaning against the tree.  She took a biscuit in one hand, a pickle in the other, and began to chat volubly to Alfred of her school life, and of Philadelphia, and the friends she had made there.  At length, remarking his abstraction, she said:  “You are not listening to me.”

“I beg your pardon.  My thoughts did wander.  I was thinking of my mother.  Something about you reminds me of her.  I do not know what, unless it is that little mannerism you have of pursing up your lips when you hesitate or stop to think.”

“Tell me of her,” said Betty, seeing his softened mood.

“My mother was very beautiful, and as good as she was lovely.  I never had a care until my father died.  Then she married again, and as I did not get on with my step-father I ran away from home.  I have not been in Virginia for four years.”