‘What sort of a person were you in a former state, Mr. Rollo?’

’I see the knowledge was not mutual.  I am sorry.—­This is a pleasant place!’

‘This identical grey rock?’

’Don’t you think so?’—­in a tone which assumed the proposition.

‘Very,’ said Wych Hazel with a demure face;—­’I do not know which abound most—­the pleasures of Hope, Memory, or Imagination.  But I thought perhaps you meant the mountain.’

‘The pleasures of the Present, then, you do not perceive?’ said Mr. Rollo, peering about very busily among the trees and rocks in his vicinity.

‘Poor Hope and Imagination!’ said Miss Hazel,—­’must they be banished to the “former state?” Memory does hold a sort of middle ground.’

‘There isn’t much of that sort of ground here,’ said Mr. Rollo; ’we are on a pretty steep pitch of the hill.  Don’t you like this wilderness?  You want a gun though—­or a pencil—­to give you the sense that you have something to do in the wilderness.’

‘Yes!’ said Miss Hazel—­’so Englishmen say:  “What a nice day it is!—­let’s go out and kill something.” ’

There was a good deal of amusement and keenness in his sideway glance, as he demurely asked her ’if she didn’t know how to shoot?’ But Wych Hazel, with a slight gesture of her silky curls, merely remarked that she had pencils in her pocket—­if he wanted one.

‘Thank you—­have you paper too?’

‘Plenty.’

‘That I may not seem intolerably rude,’ said he, extending his hand for the paper,—­’will you make one sketch while I make another?  We will limit the time, as they did at the London Sketch Club.’

’O, I shall not think it even tolerably rude.  But all my paper is in this book.’

’To secure the conditions, I must tear a leaf out.—­How will that do?’

‘Very well,’ she said with a wee flitting of colour,—­’if you will secure my conditions too.’

‘What are they?’ As he spoke he tore the leaf out and proceeded to accommodate himself with a pamphlet for a drawing board.

‘You had no right to the leaf till you heard them!’ she cried jumping up.  ’I shall take care how I bargain with you again, Mr. Rollo.’

‘Not safe?’ said he smiling.  ’But you are, this time, for I accepted the conditions, you know.  And besides—­you have the pencils yet.’  There was a certain gay simplicity about his manner that was disarming.

‘Did you?’ said Hazel looking down at him.  ’Then you are injudicious to accept them unheard.  One of them is very hard.  The first is easy—­you are to restore the leaf when the sketch is done.’

‘It is the decree of the strongest!  And the other?’

’You are to confess my sketch to be the best.  Now what is the subject to be?’

‘Stop a bit!’ said he, turning over the book which Wych Hazel had given him wrong side first—­’I should like to see what I am to swear to, before we begin.’  And the bits of her drawing which were found there received a short but keen consideration.  ’The subject?—­is this grey rock where we are—­ with what is on and around it.’