It dawned upon George that there was a reason for this: the second officer could not leave the boat. The boat and the sea were hidden by the ridge of the sea road, and the longer the time the hearty fellows could spend ashore, the greater their relief from labour and their enjoyment of a pleasant day. He saw them sauntering towards the spinney; they took sticks and beat it in a sort of aimless, perfunctory manner, poking into the brushwood half-heartedly here and there, as though Demaine had been a hare whom they desired to start from its form. They wandered off along the edge of the wood in a direction opposite to his own, and paused a moment to light their pipes upon their way. It was a peaceful scene: but a moment would come when that scene could not be prolonged, and when their activity must be renewed. Demaine, therefore, pushed through the brushwood, still going as noiselessly as he could, and came out to the landward side of it upon a disused lawn. The grass was brown and rank and trampled. It had not been mown that season. An old sun-dial stood in the midst of it; a wall bounded it upon two sides, and there was the beginning of a gravel path. He followed that path between two rows of rusty laurels, and round a sharp turn came upon the house to which this derelict domain belonged. He came upon it suddenly. It stood low and had been masked from him by a belt of trees. He saw a little back door, and,--fatal as had such reasoning been in his immediate past,--he reasoned once more: that where there was a house with servants’ offices, there would be a difference of social rank, there would be education, there would be understanding, and he must certainly come into his own. His bleeding feet, the soaked rags that clung upon him, his hair hanging in absurd straight lines clogged with salt, would, could he have seen them in a looking-glass, have given him pause. But the exhaustion of these terrible hours was now upon him; the heat of the sun was increasing,--he was under an absolute necessity for food and repose. He boldly opened the door and went in. He found himself in a little room of which this door was evidently the private communication with the garden; it was a room that lifted his heart. To begin with, it was lined everywhere with books, and though he himself had read perhaps but eighteen volumes in the whole course of his early manhood, yet a room lined with books justly suggested to him cultivation, leisure, and a certain amount of wealth. A volume was lying with its flyleaf open upon the table. He saw pasted in it a book-plate in the modern style, made out in the name of Carolus Merry Armiger. Mr. Armiger, it seemed, was his unsuspecting host. Mr. Armiger’s literary occupations did not interest George Mulross; such as they were he gathered them to have some connection with the Ten Lost Tribes.