After the warm day, all the evening scents were abroad, carried by a gentle wind.  Sir Arthur drank them in, with the sensuous pleasure which had been one of his gifts in life.  The honey smell of the heather, the woody smell of the bracken, the faint fragrance of wood-smoke wafted from a bonfire in the valley below—­they all carried with them an inexpressible magic for the man wandering on the moor.  So did the movements of birds—­the rise of a couple of startled grouse, the hovering of two kestrels, a flight of wild duck in the distance.  Each and all reminded him of the halcyon times of life—­adventures of his boyhood, the sporting pleasures of his manhood.  By George!—­how he had enjoyed them all!

Presently, to his left, on the edge of the heathery slope he caught sight of one of the butts used in the great grouse-shoots of the moor.  What a jolly party they had had last year in that week of wonderful October weather!  Two hundred brace on the home moor the first day, and almost as many on the Fairdale moor the following day.  Some of the men had never shot better.  One of the party was now Viceroy of India; another had been killed in one of the endless little frontier fights that are the price, month by month, which the British Empire pays for its existence.  Douglas had come off particularly well.  His shooting from that butt to the left had been magnificent.  Sir Arthur remembered well how the old hands had praised it, warming the cockles of his own heart.

“I will have one more shoot,” he said to himself with passion—­“I will!”

Then, feeling suddenly tired, he sat down beside the slipping stream.  It was fairly full, after some recent rain, and the music of it rang in his ears.  Stretching out a hand he filled it full of silky grass and thyme, sniffing at it in delight.  “How strange,” he thought, “that I can still enjoy these things.  But I shall—­till I die.”

Below him, as he sat, lay the greater part of his estate stretching east and west; bounded on the west by some of the high moors leading up to the Pennine range, lost on the east in a blue and wooded distance.  He could see the towers of three village churches, and the blurred greys and browns of the houses clustering round them—­some near, some far.  Stone farm-buildings, their white-washed gables glowing under the level sun, caught his eye, one after the other—­now hidden in wood, now standing out upon the fields or the moorland, with one sycamore or a group of yews to shelter them.  And here and there were larger houses; houses of the middle gentry, with their gardens and enclosures.  Farms, villages, woods and moors, they were all his—­nominally his, for a few weeks or months longer.  And there was scarcely one of them in the whole wide scene, with which he had not some sporting association; whether of the hunting field, or the big autumn shoots, or the jolly partridge drives over the stubbles.