‘After all, conventional, commonplace, as this sort of thing may be, it gives one an idea of power,’ he thought, in his half-cynical way, ‘and is pleasant enough for the moment. Sardanapalus, with a nation of slaves under his heel, could only have enjoyed the same kind of sensation on a larger scale.’ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XII ‘IT WAS THE HOUR WHEN WOODS ARE COLD.’ WHILE the Squire of Penwyn surveyed his flower and fern-bedecked board, and congratulated himself that he was a power in the land, his lodge-keeper, the woman with tawny skin, sun-browned almost to mahogany colour, dark brows and night-black eyes, sat at her door-step watching the swiftly changing splendours of the west, where the sky was still glorious with the last radiance of the sunken sun. The crimson light glows on the brown skin, and gleams in the dusky eyes as the woman sits with her face fronting westward. She has a curious fancy for out-of-door life, and is not often to be found inside the comfortable lodge. She prefers the door-step to an arm-chair by the hearth, even in winter; nay, she has been seen to sit at her threshold, with a shawl over her head, during a pitiless storm, watching the lightning with those bright bold eyes of hers. Her grandchild Elspeth has the same objection to imprisonment within four walls. She has no gates to open, and can roam where she lists. She avails herself of that privilege without stint, and wanders from dawn till sunset, and sometimes late into the starry night. She has resisted all Mrs. Penwyn’s kind attempts to beguile her along the road to knowledge by the easy steps of the parish school. She will not sit among the rosy-cheeked Cornish children, or walk to church with the neatly-clad procession from the Sunday school. She is more ignorant than the small toddlers of three or four, can neither read nor write, hardly knows the use of a needle, and in the matter of Scriptural and theological knowledge is a very heathen.