Howard, beautiful in evening-dress, came sauntering to the door with his long white hands in his pocket and a plaintive reproach on his Vandyke face.
"I was just about to send off the search party, my dear Stafford," he said.

"Is it possible that you have just come down that hill?
Good heavens! What follies are committed in thy name, O Sport! And of course there are no fish--there never are! The water is always too thin or too thick, the sky too bright or too dull, the wind too high or too low.
Excuses are the badge of all the angling tribe." Stafford took his basket from his shoulder and made a pretence of slinging it at Howard's head; then tossed it to the landlord, who stood by, smiling obsequiously.
"Cook some of 'em as soon as you can," he said; then he followed the neat and also smiling chamber-maid up to his room, where, for all his pretended indolence and cynicism, Howard had caused his friend's things to be laid out in readiness for him.

Stafford dressed slowly, smoking a cigarette during the operation, and still thinking of the strange "farmer's daughter." And then he went down and joined Howard in the room he had ordered.
Lake hotels may lack the splendour to which we are all growing accustomed, and of which, alas! we are also growing rather wearied, but they are most of them extremely comfortable and cosy; and The Woodman at Carysford was no exception to the rule.

Stafford looked round the low-pitched room, with its old-fashioned furniture, its white dinner-cloth gleaming softly in the sunset and the fire-light, and sighed with a nod of satisfaction.
"This is something like, eh, old man ?" he said; and even Howard deigned to nod approvingly.
"Yes," he said.

"If anything could compensate one for the miseries of travel, especially that awful drive, this should do so.