Hilaria’s feminine instinct for the right atmosphere had led her to choose.  The moor sloped slightly for a mile or so below it, and it was not so much a genuine hollow as made to seem like one by the semi-circle of huge boulders that backed it.  Set below and almost within them, the curving ground showed a more vivid green than the rest of the moor, as of some elfin lawn held in an ancient enchantment by the hoar rocks.  They towered above, piled on and against each other as though flung by freakish gods; from the fissures sprang wind-wilted thorns, now in young leaf of a pure rich green, with thickly-clustered buds just breaking into a dense snow of blossom.  Periwinkles trailed down upon the turf, and the closely set stonecrop made a reddish bloom on the lower boulders, amidst bronze-hued moss, pale fragile scales of lichen, and glossy leaved fibrous-rooted ivy, that all went to pattern their sullen grey with delicate arabesques.  The strongest note of colour was in the wild hyacinths, that, where the earth had been disturbed at some time and so given them a chance, made drifts of a deep blue that seemed almost purple where they came against the paler azure of the sky.

The boys climbed to the flat top of the highest boulder, where the gorse-bushes, some still darkly green, some breaking into yellow flame, thrust their strong clumps from the rocky soil to stretch in a level sea, inset with tracts of heath and bracken, for miles around.  The whole arc of the sky, the whole circle of the world’s rim, lay bare to the eye, infinitely varied by clouds and cloud-shadows, by pasture and arable, dark patches of woods and pallor of pools, by the lambent burnish of the west and the soft purpling of the east, even by differing weathers—­here great shafts of sunlight, there the blurred column of a distant shower, or the faint smear, like a bruise upon the horizon, of a low-hanging mist.

Killigrew lay on his stomach and gazed his fill, his thin nostrils dilating rather like a rabbit’s, as they always did if he were moved by anything—­a trick which, with his light eyelashes, had won for him the name of “Bunny.”  Ishmael threw himself on his back and lay staring up at the sky as it was slowly drawn past overhead, till with hard gazing the whole world seemed spinning round him and the plummet of his sight was drowned in the shifting heights that seemed to his reeling senses bottomless depths.  When Killigrew spoke he plucked his eyes from their fixed stare with what was a physical effort and turned them giddily on to the other boy’s usually pale face, now copper-pink in the warm light.

“Why d’you suppose she don’t like Doughty?” asked Killigrew.

“I dunno ...; he is rather a swine, anyway.”

“Yes, but how does she know that?”

This was a poser, and Ishmael failed at an answer beyond a feeble “Oh, well, because he is.”

“If he’s been a cad to her—­” muttered Killigrew, vengefully.