Page:The King in Yellow (1895).djvu/282

270 “I—I—have almost decided to—er—not to flip the flies about just now,” he began. There's the pole that Cécile left”

“Don't call it a pole,” corrected Rowden.

“Rod then,” continued Elliott, and started off in the wake of the two girls, but was promptly collared by Rowden.

“No you don’t! Fancy a man fishing with a float and sinker when he has a fly rod in his hand! You come along!”

Where the placid little Ept flows down between its thickets to the Seine, a grassy bank shadows the haunt of the gudgeon, and on this bank sat Colette and Jacqueline and chattered and laughed and watched the swerving of the scarlet quills, while Hastings, his hat over his eyes, his head on a bank of moss, listened to their soft voices and gallantly unhooked the small and indignant gudgeon when a flash of a rod and a half suppressed scream announced a catch. The sunlight filtered through the leafy thickets awaking to song the forest birds. Magpies in spotless black and white flirted past, alighting near by with a hop and bound and twitch of the tail. Blue and white jays with rosy breasts shrieked through the trees, and a low-sailing hawk wheeled among the fields of ripening wheat, putting to flight flocks of twittering hedge birds.

Across the Seine a gull dropped on the water like a plume. The air was pure and still. Scarcely a leaf moved. Sounds from a distant farm came faintly the shrill cock-crow and dull baying. Now and then a steam-tug with big raking smoke-pipe, bearing the name, “Guêpe 27,” ploughed up the river dragging its interminable train of barges, or a sailboat