“Muriel, I suppose I ought to be greatly impressed with the fact that he is a viscount. People over here treat him as though he were made of a very superior kind of clay, my mother among them, but the viscount himself isn’t a bit flattered by the adulation he receives. He calls it ‘tommyrot,’ and whenever there are social functions at the castle (honest Injun, Rilla, that’s what they call the turreted stone pile in which he lives), he retires to his rustic log cabin in the woods, which is so hedged in that strangers could not even guess that it was there unless they happened to stumble on it.
“I wish I could tell you about the man himself and do justice to him, but I simply can’t. He has the most boyish face I ever saw crowned with grey hair. He tells me that he is forty-five years old, but he seems nearer my age than any chap of twenty I ever met.
“The first time I met him he suggested a hike through Scotland. It seemed a good deal of an undertaking, for I wasn’t very strong (just beginning to take short walks), but every day I grew stronger, and what a week it was.
“The Viscount of Wainwater with a pack on his back was not recognized by anyone. The boy in his nature was very much in evidence that week. He sang as we tramped along the deserted highways and sometimes I knew that he was improvising. Then it was that I made a discovery. He is the Waine Waters whose vagabond poems so often appear in American magazines.
“One night we stopped at an out-of-the-way inn. We had been tramping over a snow-covered moor and, as we sat near the great fireplace where peat was burning, he began to scribble and at last he looked up and asked, ‘Shall I read it to you?’ I nodded, and, Muriel, that poem was a gem. It was called ‘The Moor in Winter,’ and told of the quiet trust that is in the heart of all nature, for, although the moor lies covered with snow, it is dreaming of the spring that is to bring back the bird song and the heather.
“I asked Waine (he told me to call him that) for a copy of the poem, and he gave it to me. I had planned sending it to you. I had it a week later when I returned. I took it to the library to show mother, but, finding that Monsieur Carnot and father were there, I turned away. I have never seen it since. I must have dropped it and the maid probably thought it merely a scrap and burned it. I’ll ask Waine for another copy some day, but just now, with his countess mother, he has gone away for a fortnight.