For a week-end he had invited Holden and Lowell, two former classmates, and Nelson Mortimer and his bride.  They were all old friends of their host and well acquainted with the cause of his discouragement.  So they did not ask to be entertained, but, disregarding him, amused themselves after their own fashion.  It was late Friday afternoon.  The members of the house-party had just returned from a tramp through the woods and had joined Ainsley on the terrace, where he stood watching the last rays of the sun leave the lake in darkness.  All through the day there had been sharp splashes of rain with the clouds dull and forbidding, but now the sun was sinking in a sky of crimson, and for the morrow a faint moon held out a promise of fair weather.

Elsie Mortimer gave a sudden exclamation, and pointed to the east.  “Look!” she said.

The men turned and followed the direction of her hand.  In the fading light, against a background of sombre clouds that the sun could not reach, they saw, moving slowly toward them and descending as they moved, six great white birds.  When they were above the tops of the trees that edged the lake, the birds halted and hovered uncertainly, their wings lifting and falling, their bodies slanting and sweeping slowly, in short circles.

The suddenness of their approach, their presence so far inland, something unfamiliar and foreign in the way they had winged their progress, for a moment held the group upon the terrace silent.

“They are gulls from the Sound,” said Lowell.

“They are too large for gulls,” returned Mortimer.  “They might be wild geese, but,” he answered himself, in a puzzled voice, “it is too late; and wild geese follow a leader.”

As though they feared the birds might hear them and take alarm, the men, unconsciously, had spoken in low tones.

“They move as though they were very tired,” whispered Elsie Mortimer.

“I think,” said Ainsley, “they have lost their way.”

But even as he spoke, the birds, as though they had reached their goal, spread their wings to the full length and sank to the shallow water at the farthest margin of the lake.

As they fell the sun struck full upon them, turning their great pinions into flashing white and silver.

“Oh!” cried the girl, “but they are beautiful!”

Between the house and the lake there was a ridge of rock higher than the head of a man, and to this Ainsley and his guests ran for cover.  On hands and knees, like hunters stalking game, they scrambled up the face of the rock and peered cautiously into the pond.  Below them, less than one hundred yards away, on a tiny promontory, the six white birds stood motionless.  They showed no sign of fear.  They could not but know that beyond the lonely circle of the pond were the haunts of men.  From the farm came the tinkle of a cow-bell, the bark of a dog, and in the valley, six miles distant, rose faintly upon the stillness of the sunset hour the rumble of a passing train.  But if these sounds carried, the birds gave no heed.  In each drooping head and dragging wing, in the forward stoop of each white body, weighing heavily on the slim, black legs, was written utter weariness, abject fatigue.  To each even to lower his bill and sip from the cool waters was a supreme effort.  And in their exhaustion so complete was something humanly helpless and pathetic.