the Scotch countryside was full.  Her own mood was tuned thereby to an ever higher and more tragic key.  Nobody indeed of the party was the least tragic.  Everybody walked, fished, flirted, and laughed from morning till night.  Yet every newspaper, every post, brought news of some death that affected one or other of the large group; and amid all the sheer physical joy of the long days in the open, bathed in sun and wind, there was a sense in all of them—­or almost all of them—­that no summer now is as the summers of the past, that behind and around the laughter and the picnicking there lay the Shadow that darkens the world.

One gorgeous evening of gold and purple she was sitting by a highland stream with a lad of twenty, throwing ducks and drakes into the water.  She was not at all in love with him; but, immature as she was, she could not help seeing that he was a good deal in love with her.  He had been in uproarious spirits all the afternoon, and then somehow he had contrived to find this moment alone with her.

‘Well, it’ll be good-bye to-morrow, or perhaps to-night,’ he had said, as he flung yet another stone into the river, and she clapped her hands as she counted no less than six skips along the smooth water.

‘And then no leave for a long time?’

‘Well, I’d been ten months without any before.’

‘Perhaps we’ll meet here again—­next year.’

‘I don’t expect it,’ he said quietly.

Her startled eyes met his full.

’It’ll be worse fighting this winter than last—­it’ll go on getting worse till the end.  I don’t look to coming back.’

His tone was so cheerful and matter-of-fact that it confused her.

‘Oh, Basil, don’t talk like that!’ was all she could find to say.

’Why not?  Of course it’s better not to talk about it.  Nobody does.  But just this afternoon—­when it’s been so jolly—­here with you, I thought I’d like to say a word.  Perhaps you’ll remember—­’

He threw another stone, and on the moor beyond the stream she heard the grouse calling.

‘Remember what?’

‘That I was quite willing,’ he said simply.  ’That’s all.  It’s worth it.’

She could say nothing, but presently her hand dropped its pebble and found its way into his, and he had held it without saying a word for a little while.  Then after dinner, with no good-bye to her, he had disappeared by the night train to the south.

And that had been the spirit of all of them, those jolly, rampagious lads, plain or handsome, clever or slow.  Two of them were dead already.  But the one who had thrown ducks and drakes was still, so far as she knew, somewhere in the Ypres salient, unscathed.

And after that she had come home to the atmosphere created by her father’s life and character, in this old house where she was born, and in the estate round about it.  It was as though she had only just realized—­begun to realize—­her father’s strangeness.  His eccentricities and unpopularity had meant little to her before.  Her own real interests had lain elsewhere; and her mind had been too slow in developing to let her appreciate his fundamental difference from other people.