Left an orphan while yet a child, David had spent his boyhood alone in the north of Scotland. His guardian--an uncle with a seat in Parliament and an estate near Ravenglass--he never saw; his tutor--an unpractical scholar of the old-fashioned type--he neglected, in order to follow the marsh-lamps of his own dreamy and somewhat morbid imagination. And so dividing his time between the study of the more exuberant poets and solitary rides along the bleak sea-coast, he mapped out the world for himself upon a purely fanciful plan. He first came into contact with actual life on his migration to Oxford. He was brought face to face with new facts and new experiences, which, strive as he might, he could not fit in with his theories. And, besides, he seemed to see all around him men actuated by the interests of truth toiling noisily at the overthrow of creeds and erecting nothing in their place. As a consequence, his false idealism crumbled beneath him, he lost his self-reliance, and felt hemmed in by a confused tangle of truth and falsehood which there was no clue to help him to unravel. The step between an intellectual scepticism and personal cynicism is an easy one for most men to take. Gordon strode over the intervening gaps unconsciously the moment he ceased to trust himself, since his own sensations had, of necessity, been the one standard by which he judged. His meeting with Kate Nugent, however, changed the whole tenor of his mind. She appeared to him the one real thing that he had found in his journey through a world of shadows. He pictured her standing out white and clear from a background of shifting haze, and his very self-distrust diminished since he referred his thoughts and actions to his conception of her as to a touchstone for the testing of them. After their engagement, she became almost his religion. He re-fashioned a second world in her image, faith coming to him like a child born from the joining of their hearts. His ambitions, so long dulled to inaction, sprang into new vigour and he followed their lead with a confident patience. There was, in fact, an element of quaint extravagance in his devotion, such as one finds mirrored in the love-poems of the seventeenth century. Hence it came about that as he walked home in the fall of the afternoon, matching the sunset with the colour of his thoughts, the sight of the white Inn walls, prominent in a dark clump of firs, recalled to him not only the fact of Hawke's proximity, but his desire to put an end to their estrangement. The desire grew as he dwelled upon it, until he began to feel an absolute repulsion from the prospect of starting along this new stage of his life at enmity with an old comrade.