Martin: Ambrose in nineteen, and will very soon be twenty. Jessica: What's nineteen, or even twenty, in a man? Fie! a man's not a man till he comes of age, and the hero's not Ambrose for all his wisdom, though wisdom becomes a hero. Nor Heriot for all his beauty, though a hero should be beautiful. Nor Hugh, who will one day be brave enough for any hero, though now he's but a boy. Nor the happy Lionel, who is only a child--yet I love a gay hero. It's none of these, full though they be of the qualities of heroes. And here is your Hobb with nothing to show but a fondness for roses. Martin: You deserve to be stood in a corner for that nothing, Mistress Jessica. Your reason was such a bad one that I see I must return to sense if only to teach you a little of it. Did I not say Hobb had a loving heart? Jessica: But he was plain and simple and patient and contented. Are these things for a hero? Martin: Mistress Jessica, I will ask you a riddle. What is it--? Oh, but first, I take it you love apple-trees? Jessica: Who doesn't? Martin: What is it, then, you love in an apple-tree? Is it the dancing of the leaves in the wind? Is it the boldness of the boughs? Or perhaps the loveliness of the flower in spring? Or again the fruit that ripens of the flower amongst the leaves on the boughs? What is it you love in an apple-tree? Jessica: All riddles are traps. I must consider before I answer. Martin: You shall consider until the conclusion of my story, and not till you are satisfied that many things can be contained in one, will I require your solution. And as for traps, it is always the solver of riddles who lays his own trap, by looking all round the question and never straight at it. Put on your thinking-cap, I beg, while I go on babbling.) On the March day following the brothers' talk (continued Martin) Lionel was missing. It was some time before his absence was noticed, for Hobb was in his distant garden, and Ambrose among his books, and Heriot had ridden north to the market-town to buy stuff for a jerkin, and Hugh had run south to the sea to watch the ships. So Lionel was left to his own devices, and what they were none tried to guess till evening, when the brothers met again and he was not there. Then there was hue and cry among the hills, but to no purpose. The child had vanished like a cloud. And the month wore by, and their hearts grew heavier day by day. It was in the last week of March that Hugh one morning came red-eyed to his brothers and said, "I am going away, and I will not come back until I have found Lionel. For I can't rest." "None of us can do that," said Ambrose, "and we have searched and sent messengers everywhere. You are too young to go alone."