Meanwhile Derval, save for his mother's care and Mr. Laud's tuition, would have grown up in rather a rough and scrambling manner; as it was he was a little undisciplined; prone to bird-nesting, seeking the eggs of the choughs and cormorants among the rocks; helping himself to apples in anyone's orchard, and rambling far afield, and clambering up eminences where he could see the variously tinted groves that bordered on the deep blue bay, the distant sea itself--glorious, glittering and far-stretching; the brown boats drawn up on the golden sands; the passing ships under white canvas, or the steamers with volumes of dusky smoke curling far on the ambient air. He was rather addicted, we fear, to playing the truant, and especially of skipping if he could the afternoon class for catechism held by Mr. Laud in his church at Finglecombe, a quaint old fane, concerning which there is a terrible old legend well-known in Devonshire. In 1638 a ball of fire burst into it during time of service, killing and wounding, or scorching, sixty-six persons, and this event took in time a wild form, and we are told how the devil, dressed in black, inquired his way on that identical Sunday of a woman who kept a little ale-house at the end of the Come, and offered her money to become his guide. But she, distrusting him, offered him a tankard of good Devonshire cyder, which went hissing and steaming down his throat; and her suspicions were confirmed, when, as he rode off towards the church, she saw his cloven foot, and a few minutes after the terrible catastrophe occurred, and Finglecombe church was strewn with dead and dying--a story that often made little Derval cower in his crib in the gusty nights of winter. What was to be his future, some twelve years hence, was the ever-recurring thought of his parents. Greville feared he would inevitably grow up a rough country lad, and already, man-like, he shivered at the idea of Derval--_his_ son--becoming such, and in the time to come, getting up "a copse and hedgerow flirtation" with a daughter of some cob-cottager--marrying her it might be, and being thus inevitably dragged down into the mire. At such thoughts his heart used to die within him. We have said that Mary Hampton's constitution was a peculiarly delicate one, and now an illness fell upon her which was to prove only the beginning of the end. Mr. Laud averred that at Christmas-time none could decorate his little church, especially "the sanctuary" thereof, so tastefully as Mary, with scarlet hollyberries and green glistening leaves, and so, on one occasion having prolonged her labours in the cold, damp edifice far into the late hours of a winter night, she caught a chill, fevered, and became hopelessly consumptive. Her cheeks grew hollow, her lips pale, and there came into her sweet sad eyes a pathetic and settled intensity of expression.