"He'd make me tell him all about it, and I feel as if I couldn't," muttered the lad. "It tastes more and more bitter every time I think about it, and if Master Rayburn began to ask me questions, he'd get it all out of me, for he has such a way of doing it. I don't believe any one could tell him a lie without being found out. Of course I shouldn't tell him one. No, I won't go. He'd say that I behaved badly, and I don't want to be told, for though I wouldn't own it, I know it better than any one could tell me. Hang the Darleys! I wish there wasn't one on the face of the earth." So, instead of going to old Master Rayburn's cottage, Mark walked back to the Black Tor, and after making up his mind to go down into the lead-mine, and chip off bits of spar, he went and talked to his sister, and told her, naturally enough, all that had passed. Mary Eden, who was about a year older, and very like him in feature, shuddered a good deal over parts of his narration, and looked tearful and pained at the end. "What's the matter?" he said, rather roughly; "why, you're going to cry!" "I can't help it, Mark," she said sadly. "Why: what makes you look like that?" said the lad irritably. "Because--because--" she faltered. "Well, because--because--" he cried mockingly. "Because what?" "Don't be angry with me, dear. My brother Mark seems as if he behaved like a Darley, and that young Darley like my brother Mark." "Oh!" cried the lad, jumping up in a rage; and he rushed off, in spite of an appealing cry from Mary, and went down into the mine after all, where he met Dummy Rugg, old Dan's son, and went for a ramble in the very lowest and grimmest parts, feeling as if to get away from the light of day would do him good, for his sister's words had struck very deeply into his heart. It was a gloomy place, that mine, and opened out into strange cavernous places, eaten away by water, or by strange crackings and subsidences of the earth, in the far distant ages when the boiling springs of the volcanic regions were depositing the beds of tufa, here of immense thickness, springs which are still in evidence, but no longer to pour out waters that scald, but of a gentle lukewarm or tepid temperature, which go on depositing their suspended stone to this day, though in a feeble, sluggish manner. Dan Rugg was Sir Edward's chief man over the mine. Not a gentleman superintendent, but a genuine miner, who gave orders, and then helped to carry them out. He had the credit of knowing more about mines than any man in the midland counties, knowledge gathered by passing quite half his life underground like a mole. Dummy was his only child, so-called on account of his being a particularly silent, stupid-looking boy. But old Dan said he was not such a fool as he looked, and Dan was right.