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announced in his unflappable drone.
    “I knew it!” Gilmott preened as Foggerty held the trout aloft as though it had just won a boxing match. “The biggest of the morning!”
    It was indeed a large rainbow for this late in the season. “What stream did you take it from, Mr. Gilmott?”
    “Yes, where, Gilmott?” Fitchett shouted from the edge of the crowd, laughing as the other fishermen joined in the questioning.
    “Yes, where, old boy? Tell us!”
    “Not likely!” Gilmott snorted, then hurried off toward the lodge, obviously pleased with himself and his newfound celebrity, surrounded by his equally happy chums.
    The tournament was a remarkable success—so far. Easy profits piling into such a large and empty bucket.
    Please, God, keep Hawkesly away from home at least until Monday.
    By then she’d have the strength to face his certain wrath and be in control of her own.
    “Been a good catch all around, my lady.” Foggerty dropped Gilmott’s trout into a bucket with other fish.
    “If the catch is good this year, Foggerty, it’s because you and Magnus have turned our streams into the finest fishing waters in the country.”
    “Just doin’ my job, my lady.”
    “Thank God for that, Foggerty.” Knowing that the man disliked the slightest hint of flattery, Kate studied the recording board as he ambled away, and found the colonel’s name, but nothing listed beside it. “No word yet from Colonel Huddleswell?”
    “Yet, my lady?” Magnus strolled up and snorted. “No insult intended, but I’m thinking that the colonel will need more than a bit of luck if he’s going to land a keeper.”
    “Don’t tell me the man is still prattling on about ourlosing his favorite split rod and flybox? It would be a perfect excuse to explain the one that got away.”
    “If you want him to leave Badger’s Run a happy fisherman, you’d best to send ’im off to the Glenwater Bend, about a half mile upstream from where Mr. Gilmott got that rainbow. Fish aplenty there. An’ ’at’s the only way he’s gonna bag anything. All the big ones seem to be comin’ out of the Glenwater this summer.”
    “If I find the colonel, I’ll send him that way.” The Glenwater Bend was a just bit off the road on the way to the hall. Two birds with one stone. She could examine the message to Hawkesly—without opening it, of course—and then there was that odd trunk that Rosemary mentioned.
    Plagued by the sense of impending doom, and the distressing feeling that she would find her husband waiting for her on the steps of Hawkesly Hall, Kate hurried past the smokehouse, the air around it already sharply aromatic with the first stock of fish for the coming winter. After checking in on Mrs. Driscoll and her crew of fish cleaners, Kate saddled up her little mare and trotted off toward Hawkesly Hall, by way of Glenwater Bend.
    She tied up the mare on the hill above and picked her way down the riverbank through the fading ferns and bracken.
    If the rainbow trout were here in abundance as Magnus believed, she’d let him know when she returned from the hall.
    “Splash me, Grady! Splash me!”
    Kate smiled at the sound of the swooooshing of water, then Healy’s happy shriek and Grady’s hootinglaughter that followed. The imps shouldn’t be playing in the chalk stream with the tournament going on.
    For that matter, they shouldn’t be this far from Hawkesly Hall.
    “Splash Dori now, Grady! An’ Mera, too!”
    “Me, now, me, meeeee, Grady!” Dori called out in her squealy singsong.
    Gracious! The whole gang of them must have wandered down from the house. She stepped around the brambles and over the fallen hornbeam, ready to shoo them away. But she paused above the rocky pool and its sun-dappled gilding, wrestling with a grin and that pesky lump in her throat at the sight of the children playing.
    Just playing. Doing what all children were put on this good green earth to do. Fearless, untroubled hearts, full bellies, a place to snuggle up