Francis Tredethlyn did not linger very long in the house where a great part of his boyhood had been spent. Martha’s husband came in presently, smelling very strongly of cowhouse and stable, and the two would fain have given Mr. Tredethlyn a detailed account of their stewardship: but the young man had no heart to listen to them. What did it matter to him that he was the poorer by the death of an Alderney cow on the pasture-farm down in the valley, or the richer by a great sheep-shearing season on the hill? He came home to find no creature of his kith or kin. He stood as much alone in the world as Adam before Eve was created to bear him company; and he felt very desolate in spite of his thirty thousand a year. He walked back to Landresdale across the bleak moorland under the still summer night. Away in the distance he saw the dark expanse of purple ocean melting imperceptibly into purple sky: and vague and dim as that shadowy distance seemed the unknown future that lay before him. He slept at the Crown, and left Landresdale early the next morning by the Falmouth coach, journeying Londonward: but he had by no means abandoned his search for Susan Tredethlyn. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER VII. MAUDE HILLARY’S ADORERS. From the bleak moorland on the Cornish hills, where no tree can flourish, and where the sweeping breath of the salt sea-breeze nips the tender verdure, and makes the quiet sheep wink again as they look oceanward; from the hilly district beyond Landresdale, which seems like the end of the world, and is at any rate the finishing-point of this British Isle, to the valley of the Thames, the sheltered and lovely hollow nestling under the wooded heights about the Star-and-Garter, is about as great a change of scene as all England can afford. It is like the pushing away of some battered front scene which has done duty for the blasted heath near Forres, whereon Macbeth met the witches, since the days when Garrick himself represented the ambitious Thane, to reveal a glimpse of fairyland fresh from the pencil of Mr. Beverley, with sunlit cascades glimmering here and there amongst the verdant valleys, and forest-trees reflected in the calm bosom of a lake.