"You go on," he called back. "It's straight over the brow of the hill, and then you can see. I'll pick you up in no time."
But when they looked back from the summit, there was no trace of him on the upward path.
"There is no use waiting," said Ted oracularly. "By George! what a relief this is."
He spoke in glad confidence as his eye travelled over God's good world untouched, undefiled, and yet in his heart of hearts he would not have scrupled at any desecration of Nature, provided it were in pursuit of gold.
Nevertheless, he responded at once to the fresh, bright breeze on the wide, undulating hill-tops, and the free, glad joy in life itself as life, came to him as they passed with springy step over grass-land and bog-land, all a-crackle with faint frost. What did they talk about? Not love, certainly--he was too wise for that--though love lay at the bottom of all his thoughts.
"How your hand trembles," she said laughingly, as he held hers in crossing a brook.
He flushed a little. "We've been going such a rate," he replied. "You're the best walker I know, for a girl."
There was something in the qualification which set her at her ease.
"I wonder what has become of Ned?" she said once, as they finally turned into the home valley and saw beneath them, spread out like a map, the familiar fields, the sloping lawn, the straight walks of the garden, the cosy, comfortable-looking chimneys all asmoke.
Ted pointed to the sky-line above them, where for an instant a dark something, which might have been a sheep, and might have been a man, showed, then disappeared.
"Up in the clouds, as usual," he laughed. "Ned is an awfully good chap, but I wish he wasn't quite so balloony."
Aura looked at him distastefully. "I like him best when he is in the clouds," she said firmly. "Of course," here she became slightly reflective, "I dare say his being so--so erratic, might put one out a good deal, and people like you would be more satisfactory to deal with; still--" here she dimpled all over--"come! let us race down the hill, and then we can be waiting tea for him when he turns up."
But there was no tea ready when Ned, whose ill humour had passed with his solitary walk, arrived.
"Thank Heaven!" cried Ted, who met him at the door. "Will you, like a good fellow, fetch the doctor; he lives beyond the hill? Mr. Smith is ill, as he was before. You can take the motor, can't you, from Dinas?"