All the neighbours about Finglecombe, but none more than Mr. Asperges Laud, were delighted with Mary's grave, sweet eyes, her softness of manner, her goodness of heart, her refined and cultivated mind, all of which lent additional charms to a certainly very statuesque little face. And Greville had won the hearts of the farmers, by riding, controlling and breaking in, for one of them, a dare-devil horse, that no jockey in Devonshire could ride, and had thereby won himself emphatically the reputation of being "a man every inch of him." But both husband and wife were very reserved, and the few who ventured to call on them when they first dropped from the clouds, as it were, into Finglecombe, could not truthfully assert that, though politely welcomed, they were urged to come again. Whether this came of a sense of shyness, or of haughty exclusiveness, none could precisely decide. Some averred it was the former in the wife and the latter in the husband, and perhaps they were right. "Both seem only to live for each other and their little boy," said Mr. Asperges Laud, their only and regular visitor in the end, and he was right certainly. Thanks to the tutelage of the worthy curate, the childish mind of little Derval Hampton began to expand, and he ceased to wonder if the sea he saw rolling in Barnstaple Bay, between craggy Hartland Point and sandy Braunton Burrows, and the uplands that bordered Finglecombe, were all the world contained; for dreams, visions and a distant knowledge of other seas and shores came upon him, and with the knowledge there came in time the usual boyish crave to see and know them. In Finglecombe, a lonely dell, where the apple groves grew entangled, and a brawling stream, concealed by their foliage from the sunshine, ran between banks of moss-grown stones towards the Bay, was an excavation or cavern in a wooded hill, known as the Pixies Parlour, a place he was wont to explore with fear and excitement, but in the daytime of course; and near it on the shore was a place, never to be visited at any time, for therein were sights to be seen that none could look upon and live--the Horses' Hole, a cavern dark as night, full of pools of water, and running an unknown distance under ground, wherein a horse black as jet had found its way, and came forth with its coat changed to snowy white; but as he grew older the place of deepest interest for him was the ruined Castle of Oakhampton, and the place named Wistmanswood, whence came the titles of that peerage his father deemed his right.