"He can send me to Woolwich, but after all that's as far as he can go. You're not at your best when you're improving," Gerald rejoined; and added with a grin, "You don't like old Alan, do you? I thought you snubbed him half an hour since."
Grace colored, but did not answer. She had hurt her foot by falling from a mossy boulder and Thorn had come to help as she floundered across a shallow pool. She was draggled and her hair was loose, and Thorn's faint amusement annoyed her. Somehow it hinted at familiarity. She would not have resented it once, for they had been friends; but when she came home and he had tried to renew the friendship she had noted a subtle difference. Alan was forty, but now she had left school the disparity of their ages was, in a sense, much less marked. Then a shout roused her and she looked round.
Where the smooth, brown water ran past the alder roots, a very small, dark object moved in advance of a faint, widening ripple. Grace knew it was the point of the otter's head; the animal's lungs were empty since it remained up so long. Next moment plunging dogs churned the pool into foam, the object vanished, and men ran along the bank to the lower rapid, while those already there beat the shallow with their poles. The dogs bunched together and began to swim up stream; Gerald and one or two more plunged into the water, and for a few moments the otter showed itself again.
It looked like a fish and not an animal as it broke the surface, rising in graceful leaps. Then it went down, with the dogs swimming hard close behind, and Grace thought it must be caught. It was being steadily driven to the lower end of the stopped rapid, where the water was scarcely a foot deep. The animal reappeared, plunging in and out among the shallows but forging up stream, and the men who meant to turn it back closed up. There was one at every yard across the belt of sparkling foam. They had spiked poles to beat the water and it seemed impossible that their victim could get past.
Yet the otter vanished, and for a minute or two there was silence, until the dogs rushed up the bank. Then somebody shouted, the huntsman blew his horn, and a small, wedge-shaped ripple trailed, very slowly across the next pool. The otter had somehow stolen past the watchers' legs and reached deep water, but its slowness told that its strength had gone. The dogs took the water with a splash, and Grace turned her head. She felt pitiful and did not want to see the end. The animal had made a gallant fight, and she shrank from the butchery.