The garden wall bounded the estate of Rashleigh Vyvyan Trevannence, Marquis of Landresdale; and beneath the shelter of that old ivy-covered red brick wall lay the churchyard, quiet and shadowy, dark with the dense foliage of great yew-trees, thick with long tangled grass, that grew high amongst the slanting headstones. Francis Tredethlyn stopped by the low wooden gate, and leaning against the moss-grown pillar that supported it, looked up at the square towers which seemed like stony sentinels for ever keeping guard over the entrance to Landresdale. The light was red upon the corner window that faced the western sky, but all the other casements stared blankly and darkly out upon the graves in the churchyard, and the empty village street, in which one woman, toiling slowly upwards with a pitcher of water that slopped and trickled at intervals upon the pavement, was the only living presence. “The great gates look just the same as they used to look,” thought Francis Tredethlyn. “When I was a boy, and read fairy-tales, I always fancied that the enchanted castle the wandering prince came to in the middle of a wood, or on the summit of a great mountain, was like Landresdale, a castle standing all alone in the middle of the way, with no road to the right nor to the left, so that the prince _must_ go in and ask shelter, though he knew that harm would come of it, or else go back and lose all the trouble of his journey. How I used to long to pull that bell when I was a lad!” thought Francis, looking at the iron ring which swung from a massive chain on one side of the archway. “But I’ve no need to dawdle here,” he thought, as he pushed the gate open and went into the churchyard. “It seems as if the nearer I get to the place where I am certain to hear the truth about Susan, the more I dread hearing it.” The ignorant traveller who might turn away from the great gates of Landresdale to descend the hill under the impression that the county of Cornwall came to an abrupt termination upon the threshold of the Marquis’s domain, would have been mistaken. There were other and higher lands, broad stretches of hill and moorland, lying beyond the churchyard, to the right of the quaint old garden and the Gothic towers and casements: and it was thitherward that Francis Tredethlyn directed his steps. He crossed the churchyard, only pausing briefly before one tombstone, upon which the names of Sarah and John Tredethlyn were cut, low down on the stone, at the bottom of a long list of Tredethlyns, who lay buried in that churchyard. The young man let himself out of the solemn precinct by a little rusty iron gate that opened on a broad expanse of common land sloping upward towards the western sky, and only broken here and there by a quarry or a patch of water.