"You may be right; but one is generally unwise to stamp on his ruling passion if it takes him along an intellectual road. These cryptic stones are my life. I want to get the secret of them or find at least a little of it. What are these lonely rings? Where are we standing now? In a place of worship, where men prayed to the thunder and the sun and stars? Or a council chamber? Or a court of justice, that has seen many a doom pronounced, much red blood flow? Or is it a grave? 'T is the fashion to reject the notion that they represent any religious purpose; yet I cannot see any argument against the theory. I go on peeping and prying after a spark of truth. I probe here, and in the fallen circle yonder towards Cosdon; I follow the stone rows to Fernworthy; I trudge again and again to the Grey Wethers--that shattered double ring on Sittaford Tor. I eat them up with my eyes and repeople the heath with those who raised them. Some clay a gleam of light may come. And if it does, it will reach me through deep study on those stone men of old. It is along the human side of my investigations I shall learn, if I learn anything at all." "I hope you may achieve your purpose, though the memoranda and data are scanty. Your name is mentioned in the _Western Morning News_ as a painstaking inquirer." "Yet when theories demand proof--that's the rub!" "Yes, indeed. You are a knight of forlorn hopes, Grimbal," answered the Vicar, alluding to Martin's past search for Chris as much as to his present archaeologic ambitions. Then he trotted on over the river, and the pedestrian remained as before seated upon a recumbent stone in the midst of the circle of Scorhill. Silent he sat and gazed into the lichens of grey and gold that crowned each rude pillar of the lonely ring. These, as it seemed, were the very eyes of the granite, but to Martin they represented but the cloak of yesterday, beneath which centuries of secrets were hidden. Only the stones and the eternal west wind, that had seen them set up and still blew over them, could tell him anything he sought to know. "A Knight of Forlorn Hopes," mused the man. "So it is, so it is. The grasshopper, rattling his little kettledrum there, knows nearly as much of this hoary secret as I do; and the bird, that prunes his wing on the porphyry, and is gone again. Not till some Damnonian spirit rises from the barrow, not till some chieftain of these vanished hosts shall take shape out of the mists and speak, may we glean a grain of this buried knowledge. And who to-day would believe ten thousand Damnonian ghosts, if they stirred here once again and thronged the Moor and the moss and the ruined stone villages with their moonbeam shapes? "Gone for ever; and she--my Chris--my dear--is she to dwell in the darkness for all time, too? O God, I would rather hear one whisper of her voice, feel one touch of her brown hand, than learn the primal truth of every dumb stone wonder in the world!" CHAPTER III CONCERNING THE GATE-POST