‘Ah, I doubt that I shall never wet one here,’ said Merton.

’As to the crystal stream, what business has it to be crystal?  That is just what I complain of.  Salmon and sea-trout are waiting out there in the bay and they can’t come up!  Not a drop of rain to call rain for the last three weeks.  That is what I meant by moralising about wealth.  You can buy half a county, if you have the money; you can take half a dozen rivers, but all the millions of our host cannot purchase us a spate, and without a spate you might as well break the law by fishing in the Round Pond as in the river.’

‘Luckily for me Alured does not much care for fishing,’ said Lady Bude, who was Merton’s companion.  The Countess had abandoned, much to her lord’s regret, the coloured and figurative language of her maiden days, the American slang.  Now (as may have been observed) her style was of that polished character which can only be heard to perfection in circles socially elevated and intellectually cultured—­’in that Garden of the Souls’—­to quote Tennyson.

The spot where Merton and Lady Bude were seated was beautiful indeed.  They reclined on the short sea grass above a shore where long tresses of saffron-hued seaweed clothed the boulders, and the bright sea pinks blossomed.  On their right the Skrae, now clearer than amber, mingled its waters with the sea loch.  On their left was a steep bank clad with bracken, climbing up to perpendicular cliffs of basalt.  These ended abruptly above the valley and the cove, and permitted a view of the Atlantic, in which, far away, the isle of the Lewis lay like a golden shield in the faint haze of the early sunset.  On the other side of the sea loch, whose restless waters ever rushed in or out like a rapid river, with the change of tides, was a small village of white thatched cottages, the homes of fishermen and crofters.  The neat crofts lay behind, in oblong strips, on the side of the hill.  Such was the scene of a character common on the remote west coast of Sutherland.

‘Alured is no maniac for fishing, luckily,’ Lady Bude was saying.  ’To-day he is cat-hunting.’

‘I regret it,’ said Merton; ‘I profess myself the friend of cats.’

’He is only trying to photograph a wild cat at home in the hills; they are very scarce.’

’In fact he is Jones Harvey, the naturalist again, for the nonce, not the sportsman,’ said Merton.

‘It was as Jones Harvey that he—­’ said Lady Bude, and, blushing, stopped.

‘That he grasped the skirts of happy chance,’ said Merton.

‘Why don’t you grasp the skirts, Mr. Merton?’ asked Lady Bude.  ’Chance, or rather Lady Fortune, who wears the skirts, would, I think, be happy to have them grasped.’

‘Whose skirts do you allude to?’

‘The skirts, short enough in the Highlands, of Miss Macrae,’ said Lady Bude; ’she is a nice girl, and a pretty girl, and a clever girl, and, after all, there are worse things than millions.’