Their paths diverged; and when Somerset reached the hotel he was informed that somebody was waiting to see him. ‘Man or woman?’ he asked. The landlady, who always liked to reply in person to Somerset’s inquiries, apparently thinking him, by virtue of his drawing implements and liberality of payment, a possible lord of Burleigh, came forward and said it was certainly not a woman, but whether man or boy she could not say. ‘His name is Mr. Dare,’ she added. ‘O--that youth,’ he said. Somerset went upstairs, along the passage, down two steps, round the angle, and so on to the rooms reserved for him in this rambling edifice of stage-coach memories, where he found Dare waiting. Dare came forward, pulling out the cutting of an advertisement. ‘Mr. Somerset, this is yours, I believe, from the Architectural World?’ Somerset said that he had inserted it. ‘I think I should suit your purpose as assistant very well.’ ‘Are you an architect’s draughtsman?’ ‘Not specially. I have some knowledge of the same, and want to increase it.’ ‘I thought you were a photographer.’ ‘Also of photography,’ said Dare with a bow. ‘Though but an amateur in that art I can challenge comparison with Regent Street or Broadway.’ Somerset looked upon his table. Two letters only, addressed in initials, were lying there as answers to his advertisement. He asked Dare to wait, and looked them over. Neither was satisfactory. On this account he overcame his slight feeling against Mr. Dare, and put a question to test that gentleman’s capacities. ‘How would you measure the front of a building, including windows, doors, mouldings, and every other feature, for a ground plan, so as to combine the greatest accuracy with the greatest despatch?’ ‘In running dimensions,’ said Dare. As this was the particular kind of work he wanted done, Somerset thought the answer promising. Coming to terms with Dare, he requested the would-be student of architecture to wait at the castle the next day, and dismissed him. A quarter of an hour later, when Dare was taking a walk in the country, he drew from his pocket eight other letters addressed to Somerset in initials, which, to judge by their style and stationery, were from men far superior to those two whose communications alone Somerset had seen. Dare looked them over for a few seconds as he strolled on, then tore them into minute fragments, and, burying them under the leaves in the ditch, went on his way again. XIII.