"Positively?" "Yes, uncle." "Pardon me," continued Lamorna, drily; "but may we inquire for where?" "Oxford--and then town after, perhaps." "Oxford--and town too," replied his uncle, testily; "the last time you left this for London, if General Trecarrel was right, you were seen for a month after in his neighbourhood; and, if his story were true--and I dare not doubt it--you did not get beyond the border of Cornwall--and were certainly not so far as Devonshire." "Trecarrel was, I hope, mistaken," urged Richard. "I hope so, too." Richard's face was pale, and to conceal his emotion, he stooped and caressed his favourite pointer, which had bounded in when the butler opened the door; and soon recovering from his little agitation--whatever its secret source might be--he politely and affectionately bade his uncle "good-bye for the present," nodded to the silent and observant Downie, took a double-barrelled breech-loader from the gun-room and sallied forth, unattended by game-keepers, desiring quite as much to indulge in reverie and enjoy a solitary ramble, as to have a shot at a passing bird. To Richard it seemed that he had read a strangely keen, weird and unfathomable expression in his uncle's eyes, as they followed his departing steps on this particular morning--an expression which, somehow, haunted him. The season, we have said, was now autumn, and a tender, mellow tone rested over all the landscape; Richard Trevelyan was fond of the strange, wild district--the land of old tradition, of bold and varied scenery--amid which his youth and so much of his manhood had been passed, and he looked around him from time to time with admiring eyes and an enthusiastic heart. A soft warm shower had fallen that morning early, refreshing the fading September leaves in the belts of coppice that girt the upland slopes, and in the orchards, where the ripe golden apples were dropping amid the thick sward below. Above the purple, and often desolate moors which are so characteristic of Cornish scenery, and where the small breed of horses, the little black cattle and sharp-nosed sheep of the province were grazing, the wooded _tors_ or hills stood boldly up in the distance, their foliage in most instances presenting many varied tints. There were the brown madder, the crisped chesnut, and the fading beech, the more faded green of the old Cornish elm, and the russet fern below, from amid which at every step he took the birds whirred up in coveys; while Richard, lost in reverie--the result of his uncle's remarks of late--never emptied a barrel at them, but walked slowly on looking round him from time to time, and filled with thoughts that were all his own as yet.