"Very well, very well," Sir Arthur said impatiently, making his way to the carriage door, and opening it, before the porter, now engaged in thoughtfully scratching his head, had collected his wits sufficiently to perform this act of courtesy for the traveller. "I conclude you know where I am to be driven," he added, speaking to the man on the box. "Yes, sir; to the house in the valley; the house where the gentleman----" "That will do, as long as you know where you are to go," Sir Arthur said, cutting short the coachman's volubility, and entering the brougham, glad to sit back amongst the cushions, and shut the window against the sweeping blast. The uplands looked their very greyest and worst on that December day. A low grey sky stooped to meet the hill-sides, on which brown heather and brown bracken made a depressing tone of colour, to mingle with the greyness of the clouds, and of the mists that crept up from the valleys. The bareness of the wide stretch of moor was broken here and there by a clump of fir-trees, which showed dark and sombre against the grey background, and the fogginess of the atmosphere obscured the great view, which was usually the chief charm of the uplands. Sir Arthur was at no time an admirer of scenery, and to-day he turned his gaze shudderingly from the barren landscape; and, drawing a paper from his pocket, proceeded to bury himself in its contents, and to thrust the outer world as far as possible away from his consciousness. By nature an unimaginative man, he had ruthlessly stamped out any germ of imagination or poetry, which might have been latent within him, setting himself with grim resolution to thrust away the beautiful as a snare, and to regard everything about him as merely temporal and destructible. He forgot, or perhaps he deliberately chose not to recognise, that the eternal is set around the temporal, not as a thing apart, but encompassing it, permeating it, so that temporal and eternal are one. He had sternly set his face against all the softer aspects of life, doing his duty grimly, and with stiff back, disinclined at any time to any relaxation in discipline either for himself or his fellow-sinners--more ready to rule by fear than by love, a man who would have made an equally excellent Ironside or Grand Inquisitor, according to the peculiar turn of his religious convictions.