At Christmas Mr. Garden and John Willie came down, the former for a few days, John Willie for a fortnight. One of his days Mr. Garden spent in a visit to Squire Wynne, who lived at the Plas, three miles away. The sea was some days as black as iron, on others as white as ash with the tumult of the wind. There was snow on the mountains, but little at Llanyglo. Even John Willie did not want to bathe. In the daytime he tried to rig up a sail on his mother's tricycle, so that he might coast along the two miles of beach before the wind; at night he often walked down to the edge of the dimly creaming water, and stood looking out into the blackness, or else at the Trwyn Light, two reds and a white. Squire Wynne, the former owner of the Royal Hotel shandrydan, was the ground landlord of Llanyglo, and the reason of Edward Garden's Christmas call on him was--still quite simply and on Minetta's account--that he had decided to build and wanted certain land to build on. But this was not quite the simple matter it might have appeared to be. With this, that, and the other, the Squire floundered in a morass of mortgages, and, for the scraping together of his interest money, could scarce have re-papered the dilapidated walls of the Plas dining-room. He had other property also, thirty miles down the coast, which he had never the heart to go and see. It was there that the family fortunes had been sunk. A score of broken shaft-chimneys and heaps of fallen masonry on a promontory were all he had to show for the good Wynne money--these, and a deed-box full of scrip and warrants which you could have had for the price of the stamps on them. For that remote volcanic waste had been a happy hunting-ground for the prospectus-monger with hopeful views on paying quantities, and the Squire had granted more concessions than he could count. It was to be presumed that somebody had made money out of the concessions, if not out of the mines themselves. The last enterprise had been manganese.