John Lee gave his grandmother a few minutes' start before he followed with extreme caution. For two miles he stalked the shadow of her, then, perceiving that she must presently enter a deep gorge known as Hangman's Hollow, where certain ruins of old mining works and blowing-houses still stood, he made a wide detour, mended his pace, and got to the neck of the coombe before her. Here he concealed himself again beside one of the rotting buildings, formerly used for smelting of tin. He hid behind a broken wall, and through a chink in it kept watch upon the ravine down which he had just hastened. Upon his left yawned a disused gravel-pit, where a labourer had hanged himself to a rowan tree and so given this sinister name to the spot. Around about, dying brake-fern spread wanly under the night; and here and there flashed the white of a rabbit's scut as it bobbed from its hole to the open and back again. On the watcher's right hand, deep sunk into the heather-clad earth, the bulk of an old blowing-house still appeared; but one side had bulged and broken out, so that the whole stood like a shattered corpse of some habitation, and shone pallid there in its pall of grey lichens and rusty moss. While still he panted after his run, and was vexed to see his breath steam into the moonlight, there came Lovey Lee slowly descending. She passed him, and turned the corner of the ruin where two broken walls rose with a shattered alley-way between them. Above towered the dome of the blowing-house; beneath was a wilderness of broken stone.