Once a year, and once only, Hiram had a holiday. For a glorious fortnight every summer, Sam Churchill and his partner gave their head draughtsman leave to go and amuse himself wheresoever the spirit led him. And on the first of such holidays, Hiram went with Audouin to the Thousand Islands, and spent a delightful time boating, fishing, and sketching, among the endless fairy mazes of that enchanted region, where the great St. Lawrence loses itself hopelessly in innumerable petty channels, between countless tiny bosses of pine-clad rock. It was a fortnight of pure enjoyment for poor drudging advertisement-drawing Hiram, and he revelled in its wealth of beauty as he had never revelled in anything earthly before during his whole lifetime.
One morning Hiram had taken his little easel out with him from Alexandria Bay to one of the prettiest points of view upon the neighbouring mainland—a jutting spit of ice-worn rock, projecting far into the placid lake, and thickly overhung with fragrant brush of the beautiful red cedar—and was making a little water-colour sketch of a tiny islet in the foreground, just a few square yards of smooth granite covered in the centre with an inch deep of mould, and crowned by a single tall straight stem of sombre spruce fir. It was a delicate, dainty little sketch, steeped in the pale morning haze of Canadian summer; and the scarlet columbines, waving from the gnarled roots of the solitary fir tree, stood out like brilliant specks of light against the brown bark and dark green foliage that formed the background. Hiram was just holding it at arm\'s length, to see how it looked, and turning to ask for Audouin\'s friendly criticism, when he heard a clear bright woman\'s voice close behind him speaking so distinctly that he couldn\'t help overhearing the words.
\'Oh, papa,\' the voice said briskly, \'there\'s an artist working down there. I wonder if he\'d mind our going down and looking at his picture. I do so love to see an artist painting.\'
The very sound of the voice thrilled through Hiram\'s inmost marrow as he heard it, somewhat as Audouin\'s voice had done long ago, when first he came upon him in the Muddy Creek woodland—only more so. He had never heard a woman\'s voice before at all like it. It didn\'t in the least resemble Miss Almeda A. Stiles\'s, or any other one of the lady students at Bethabara or Orange, who formed the sole standard of female society that Hiram Winthrop had ever yet met with. It was a rich, liquid, rippling voice, and it spoke with the soft accent and delicate deliberate intonation of an English lady. Hiram, of course, didn\'t by the light of nature recognise at once this classificatory fact as to its origin and history, but he did know that it stirred him strangely, and made him look round immediately to see from what manner of person the voice itself ultimately proceeded.
A tall girl of about nineteen, with a singularly full ripe-looking face and figure for her age, was standing on the edge of the little promontory just above, and looking down inquisitively towards Hiram\'s easel. Her cheeks had deeper roses in them than Hiram had ever seen before, and her complexion was clearer and more really flesh-coloured than that of most pale and sallow American women. \'What a beautiful skin to paint!\' thought Hiram instinctively; and then the next moment, with a flush of surprise, he began to recognise to himself that this unknown girl, whose eyes met his for an infinitesimal fraction of a second, had somehow immediately impressed him—nay, thrilled him—in a way that no other woman had ever before succeeded in doing. In one word, she seemed to him more womanly. Why, he didn\'t know, and couldn\'t have explained even to himself, for Hiram\'s forte certainly did not lie in introspective analysis; but he felt it instinctively, and was conscious at once of a certain bashful desire to speak with her, which he had never experienced towards a single one of the amiable young ladies at Bethabara Seminary.
\'Gwen, my dear,\' the father said in a dried-up Indian military tone, \'you will disturb these artists. Come away, come away; people don\'t like to be watched at their duties, really.\'
Gwen, by way of sole reply, only bent over the edge of the little bluff that overhung the platform of rock where Hiram was sitting, and said with the same clear deliberate accent as before, \'May I look? Oh, thank you. How very, very pretty!\'
\'It isn\'t finished yet,\' Audouin said, taking the words out of Hiram\'s mouth almost, as he held up the picture for Gwen\'s inspection. \'It\'s only a rough sketch, so far: it\'ll look much worthier of the original when mv friend has put the last little touches to it. In art, you know, the last loving lingering touch is really everything.\'
Hiram felt half vexed that Audouin should thus have assumed the place of spokesman for him towards the unknown lady; and yet at the same time he was almost grateful to him for it also, for he felt too abashed to speak himself in her overawing presence.
\'Yes, the original\'s beautiful,\' Gwen answered, taking her father\'s arm and leading him down, against his will, to the edge of the water: \'but the sketch is very pretty too, and the point of view so exquisitely chosen. What a thing it is, papa, to have the eye of an artist, isn\'t it? You and I might have passed this place a dozen times over, and never noticed what a lovely little bit it is to make a sketch of; but the painter sees it at once, and picks out by instinct the very spot to make a beautiful picture.\'
\'Ah, quite so,\' the father echoed in a cold unconcerned voice, as if the subject rather bored him. \'Quite so, quite so. Very pretty place indeed, an excellent retired corner, I should say, for a person who has a taste that way, to sit and paint in.\'
\'It is beautiful,\' Audouin said, addressing himself musingly to the daughter, \'and our island in particular is the prettiest of all the thousand, I do believe.\'
\'Your island?\' Gwen cried interrogatively. \'Then you own that sweet little spot there, do you?\'
\'My friend and I, yes,\' Audouin answered airily, to Hiram\'s great momentary astonishment. \'In the only really worthy sense of ownership, we own it most assuredly. I dare say some other man somewhere or other keeps locked up in his desk a dirty little piece of crabbed parchment, which he calls a title-deed, and which gives him some sort of illusory claim to the productive power of the few square yards of dirt upon its surface. But the island itself and the enjoyment of it is ours, and ours only: the gloss on the ice-grooves in the shelving granite shore, the scarlet columbines on the tall swaying stems, the glow of the sunlight on the russet boles of the spruce fir—you see my friend has fairly impounded them all upon his receptive square of cartridge paper here for our genuine title-deed of possession.\'
\'Ah, I see, I see,\' the old gentleman said testily. \'You and your friend claim the island by prescription, but your claim is disputed by the original freeholder.\'
The three others all smiled slightly. \'Oh dear, no, papa,\' Gwen answered with a touch of scorn and impatience in her tone. \'Don\'t you understand? This gentleman——\'
\'My name is Audouin,\' the New Englander put in with a slight inclination.
\'Mr. Audouin means that the soil is somebody else\'s, but the sole enjoyment of the island is his friend\'s and his own.\'
\'The so-called landowner often owns nothing more than the dirt in the ditches,\' Audouin explained with a wave of the hand, in his romantic mystifying fashion, \'while the observer owns all that is upon it, of any real use or beauty. For our whole lifetime, my friend and I have had that privilege and pleasure. The grass grows green for us in spring; the birds build nests for us in early summer; the fire-flies flit before our eyes on autumn evenings; the stoat and hare put on their snow-white coat for our delight in winter weather. I\'ve seen a poet enjoy for a whole season the best part of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed he had only had out of it a few worthless wild apples. We are the real freeholders, sir; the man with the title-deeds has merely the usufruct.\'
\'Oh, ah,\' the military gentleman repeated, as if a light were beginning slowly to dawn upon his bewildered intelligence. \'Some reservation in favour of rights of way and royalties and so forth, in America, I suppose. Only owns the dirt in the ditches, you say,—the soil presumably. Now, in England, every landowner owns the mines and minerals and springs and everything else beneath the soil, to the centre of the earth, I believe, if I\'ve been rightly instructed.\'
\'It can seldom be worth his while to push his claims so far.\' Audouin replied with great gravity, still smiling sardonically.
Gwen coloured slightly. Hiram noticed the delicate flush of the colour, as it mantled all her cheek for a single second, and was hardly angry with his friend for having provoked so pretty a protest. Then Gwen said with a little cough, as if to change the subject: \'These islands are certainly very lovely. They\'re the most beautiful thing we\'ve seen in a six weeks\' tour in America. I don\'t think even Niagara charmed me so much, in spite of all its grandeur.\'
\'Y............