How strange and new all the wild Cornish scenery seemed to Maude, as she sat alone in the interior of the coach, which was not affected by the sturdy agriculturists and miners who were generally the only passengers on this route! How many conflicting hopes and fears found a place in her mind as she looked out at the unknown country amidst which her husband’s boyhood had been spent! Had he sailed for the New World by some later vessel than the _Kingfisher_? Was he far away from the rustic homestead towards which she was travelling with a faint hope of finding him at the end of her journey?--an unreasoning hope, which she tried to shut out of her mind in her dread of the cruel disappointment that might await her. The coach put her down before the Crown Inn, and she stood alone in Landresdale High Street, with the great gates of the marquis’s enchanted castle frowning down upon her from the top of the hill. She inquired about a conveyance to take her on to Tredethlyn Grange; and the landlord of the Crown ordered the immediate preparation of a lumbering old equipage of a tub-like character, lined with washed-out chintz, which was brought forth on rare occasions, and charged for at a prodigious rate. While the equipage was being prepared, the landlord contemplated his bright young visitor with evident curiosity, and would fain have beguiled her into conversation; but Maude had no inclination to be communicative. If she was to receive a death-blow to all her hopes, she did not want to take it from the hands of this coarse common man. She wanted to go straight to the Grange and learn her fate there, and there only. The road from Landresdale to the moorland farmhouse was longer than the by-path through the churchyard by which Francis had gone; and the clumsy old brown horse, and the lumbering vehicle in which Maude was seated, progressed very slowly. The way seemed intolerably long to her; but at last she saw a grey spot against the blue sky, and made out that the vehicle was bearing towards it by a winding track along which heavy waggons had left the impression of their broad wheels. The grey spot grew bigger and bigger against the horizon, until it grew at last into a dreary-looking habitation, with quaint old gables and moss-grown stone walls. One slender thread of smoke curled upward, white against the clear blue atmosphere; some sheep were grazing upon the patch of ground that had once been a garden; and the perfume of the clover blew towards the traveller as the fly lumbered nearer to the broken gate. Maude looked hopelessly at the quiet house,--so little sign of occupation, so little token of life. “He can’t be there,” she thought; a sudden gush of tears shutting out the grey stone walls, the clover-field and browsing sheep. “I am too late!”