After eating his fish, Woodseer decided abruptly, that as he could not have the spot to himself, memorable as it would have been to intermarry with Nature in so sacred a welldepth of the mountains, he had better be walking and climbing.  Another boat paddling up the lake had been spied:  solitude was not merely shared with a rival, but violated by numbers.  In the first case, we detest the man; in the second, we fly from an outraged scene.  He wrote a line or so in his book, hurriedly paid his bill, and started, full of the matter he had briefly committed to his pages.

At noon, sitting beside the beck that runs from the lake, he was overtaken by the gentleman he had left behind, and accosted in the informal English style, with all the politeness possible to a nervously blunt manner:  ’This book is yours,—­I have no doubt it is yours; I am glad to be able to restore it; I should be glad to be the owner-writer of the contents, I mean.  I have to beg your excuse; I found it lying open; I looked at the page, I looked through the whole; I am quite at your mercy.’

Woodseer jumped at the sight of his note-book, felt for the emptiness of his pocket, and replied:  ’Thank you, thank you.  It’s of use to me, though to no one else.’

‘You pardon me?’

‘Certainly.  I should have done it myself.’

‘I cannot offer you my apologies as a stranger.’  Lord Fleetwood was the name given.

Woodseer’s plebeian was exchanged for it, and he stood up.

The young lord had fair, straight, thin features, with large restless eyes that lighted quickly, and a mouth that was winning in his present colloquial mood.

’You could have done the same?  I should find it hard to forgive the man who pried into my secret thoughts,’ he remarked.

‘There they are.  If one puts them to paper! . . .’  Woodseer shrugged.

’Yes, yes.  They never last long enough with me.  So far I’m safe.  One page led to another.  You can meditate.  I noticed some remarks on Religions.  You think deeply.’

Woodseer was of that opinion, but modesty urged him to reply with a small flourish.  ’Just a few heads of ideas.  When the wind puffs down a sooty chimney the air is filled with little blacks that settle pretty much like the notes in this book of mine.  There they wait for another puff, or my fingers to stamp them.’

‘I could tell you were the owner of that book,’ said Lord Fleetwood.  He swept his forehead feverishly.  ’What a power it is to relieve one’s brain by writing!  May I ask you, which one of the Universities . . ?’