“I dare say,” said Doll.  “Newhaven marches with me here.  The boundary is by that clump of silver birch.  The Drone comes in there, but you can’t see it.  The Newhavens are friends of yours, aren’t they?”

“Acquaintances,” said Hugh, absently, looking hard at the water.  He had never been here before.  Memory groped blindly for a lost link, as one who momentarily recognizes a face in a crowd, and tries to put a name to it and fails.  As the face disappears, so the sudden impression passed from Hugh’s mind.

“I expect you have been here with them,” said Doll.  “Good man, Newhaven.”

“I used to see a good deal of them at one time,” said Hugh; “but they seem to have forgotten me of late.”

“Oh, that’s her!” said Doll.  “She is always off and on with people.  Takes a fancy one day and a dislike the next.  But he’s not like that.  You always know where to find him.  Solid man, Newhaven.  He doesn’t say much, but what he says he sticks to.”

“He gives one that impression,” said Hugh.

“I rather think he is there now,” said Doll, pointing to the farther shore.  “I see a figure moving, and two little specks.  I should not wonder if it were him and the boys.  They often come here on Sunday afternoons.”

“You have long sight,” said Hugh.  He had met Lord Newhaven several times since the drawing of lots, and they had always greeted each other with cold civility.  But Hugh avoided him when he could without drawing attention to the fact that he did so.

“Are you going over to his side?” he asked.

“Rather not,” said Doll.  “I have never set a single trimmer or fired a shot beyond that clump of birch, or Uncle George before me.”

The two men picked their way down the hill-side among the tall, thin tree-trunks.  There was no one except the dogs at the keeper’s cottage, in a clearing half-way down.  Doll took the key of the boat-house from a little hole under the eaves.

“I think Withers must be out,” he remarked at last, after knocking and calling at the locked door and peering through the closed window.  Hugh had been of that opinion for some time.  “Gone out with his wife, I expect.  Never mind, we can do without him.”

They went slipping over the dry beech-mast to the boat-house.  Doll unlocked the door and climbed into one of the boats; Hugh and Crack followed.  They got a perch-rod off a long shelf, and half a dozen trimmers.  Then they pulled out a little way and stopped near an archipelago of water-lily leaves.

Doll got out the perch-rod and float and made a cast.

“It’s not fishing,” he said, apologetically, half to his guest and half to his Maker.  “But we are bound to get some baits.”

Hugh nodded, and gazed down at the thin forest below.  He could see the perch moving in little companies in the still water beyond the water-trees.  Presently a perch, a very small one, out alone for the first time, came up, all stiff head and shoulders and wagging tail, to the carelessly covered hook.