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“The end of the season!” teased Bertie. “That allows you–let’s see–four, five, six more weeks of freedom.”

“Be quiet, if you don’t want a drenching!” warned Hilary. “Besides,” she added, with inconsequent optimism, “anything may happen before then. Why, I may even be married to a man I really like.”

“Great Scotland, so you may!” chuckled her brother. “There’s the wild man that Dick has brought down here to tame before launching at society. He’s a great beast like a brown bear. He wouldn’t be my taste, but that’s a detail.”

“I hate fashionable men!” declared Hilary, with scarlet face. “I’d rather marry a red Indian than one of these inane men about town.”

“Ho! ho!” laughed Bertie. “Then Dick’s wild man will be quite to your taste. As soon as he leaves off worrying mutton-bones with his fingers and teeth, we’ll ask Dick to bring him to dine.”

“You’re perfectly disgusting!” said Hilary, digging her punt-pole into the bed of the river with a vicious plunge. “If you don’t mean to behave yourself, I won’t stay with you.”

“Oh, yes, you will,” returned Bertie with brotherly assurance. “You wouldn’t miss Dick’s aborigine for anything–and I don’t blame you, for he’s worth seeing. Dick assures me that he is quite harmless, or I don’t know that I should care to venture my scalp at such close quarters.”

“You’re positively ridiculous to-day,” Hilary declared.

* * * * *

A perfect summer morning, a rippling blue river that shone like glass where the willows dipped and trailed, and a girl who sang a murmurous little song to herself as she slid down the bank into the laughing stream.

Ah, it was heavenly! The sun-flecks on the water danced and swam all about her. The trees whispered to one another above her floating form. The roses on the garden balustrade of Dick Culver’s bungalow nodded as though welcoming a friend. She turned over and struck out vigorously, swimming up-stream. It was June, and the whole world was awake and singing.

“It’s better than the entire London season put together,” she murmured to herself, as she presently came drifting back.

A whiff of tobacco-smoke interrupted her soliloquy. She shook back her wet hair and stood up waist-deep in the clear, green water.

“What ho, Dick!” she called gaily. “I can’t see you, but I know you’re there. Come down and have a swim, you lazy boy!”

There followed a pause. Then a diffident voice with an unmistakably foreign accent made reply.

“Were you speaking to me?”

Glancing up in the direction of the voice, Hilary discovered a stranger seated against the trunk of a willow on the high bank above her. She started and coloured. She had forgotten Dick’s wild man. She described him later as the brownest man she had ever seen. His face was brown, the lower part of it covered with a thick growth of brown beard. His eyes were brown, surmounted by very bushy eyebrows. His hair was brown. His hands were brown. His clothes were brown, and he was smoking what looked like a brown clay pipe.

Hilary regained her self-possession almost at once. The diffidence of the voice gave her assurance.

“I thought my cousin was there,” she explained. “You are Dick’s friend, I think?”

The man on the bank smiled an affirmative, and Hilary remarked to herself that he had splendid teeth.

“I am Dick’s friend,” he said, speaking slowly, as if learning the lesson from her. There was a slight subdued twang in his utterance which attracted Hilary immensely.

She nodded encouragingly to him.

“I am Dick’s cousin,” she said. “He will tell you all about me if you ask him.”

“I will certainly ask,” the stranger said in his soft, foreign drawl.

“Don’t forget!” called Hilary, as she splashed back into deep water. “And tell him to bring you to dine on our house-boat at eight to-night! Bertie and I will be delighted to see you. We were meaning to send a formal invitation. But no one stands on ceremony on the river–or in it either,” she laughed to herself as she swam away with swift, even strokes.