CHAPTER XI
Archie was lying on the turf in front of the enclosed bathing-place where the stream debouched into the lake. There was a good stretch of deep water free from weeds, and for the last half-hour he had been swimming and diving in it. Now, with hair drying back into its crisp curls under the hot sun, he lay on the short warm turf, with his chin supported on his hands, in an ecstasy of animal content. At this edge of the water the bank was made firm and solid with wooden boarding that went down into deep water, but across the estuary of the stream, broadening out into the lake, the shallow margin was fringed with bulrushes and loosestrife. A strip of low-lying meadow land behind was pink with campion and ragged-robin and starred with meadow-sweet, the scent of which mingled with the undefinable cool smell of running water. A bed of gravel made the bottom of the stream, and through the sun-lit water the pebbles gleamed like topazes through some liquid veil.
Never before had Archie been so permeated with the sense of the amazing loveliness of the world, and of the ineffable joy of living and of being part of it. He had wrestled with the swiftness of the stream as it narrowed, had clung to rocks and tree-roots below the surface, letting the current comb over and around and almost through him, then, letting go of his anchorage, had been floated down into the lake again with arms and legs outspread, and now, lying close-pressed to the turf with wet chest and dripping shoulders, he seemed to be part of the triumph of the summer, and of the immortal
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