Read "The Protector" by Harold Bindloss online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Vane rose early next morning, as he had been accustomed to do, and taking a towel with him made his way across dewy meadows and between tall hedgerows to the tarn. Stripping where the rabbit-cropped sward met the mossy boulders, he swam out joyously, breasting the little ripples which splashed and sparkled beneath the breeze that had got up with the sun. Coming back where the water lay in shadow beneath a larch wood, which as yet had not wholly lost its vivid green, he disturbed the paddling moor-hens and put up a mallard from a clump of swaying reeds. Then he dressed and turned homewards.
Scrambling over a limestone wall tufted thick with parsley fern, he noticed Mabel stooping down over an object which lay among the heather where a rough cartroad approached a wooden bridge. On joining her, he saw that it was a finely-built canoe with a hole in one bilge she was examining. She looked up at him ruefully, as she said, "Very sad, isn't it? That stupid Little did it with his clumsy cart."