I awoke from a dreamless sleep, a restored and avid little giant. It was bright morning. A clock on the stairs cleared its throat and sang out six times. The house was still, save for a shuffling of drowsy maids at their dusting below. I lay quiet, conscious of the most unfamiliar atmosphere all about me--of whitewashed walls; of a smell between wood-smoke and seaweed and the faint sourness of beer; of cold boarded floors gritty with sand; of utter remoteness from the noise of traffic habitual to a young denizen of towns. This little gap of time had lifted me clean out of my accustomed conditions, and dumped me in an outpost of civilization, amongst uncouth allies, friendlies in name, but as foreign as foes to my experience. I got up soon very softly, and washed and dressed and went out. I had to pass, on my way, through my uncle’s room; and it relieved me to see him slumbering peacefully on his pillow, though the white bandage across his forehead gave me a momentary shock. I emerged upon a landing, on a wall of which, papered with varnished marble, hung a smoke-stained print of a hunt, with a case of stuffed water-birds on a table beneath. No one accosted me as I descended the little creaking flight of stairs. I passed out by the unlatched private door of the tavern, and found myself at the sea-end of the village street. It was a glowing morning. Not a soul appeared abroad, and I turned to the path by which we had come the night before, thrilling to possess the sea. The ground went gently up by the way of a track that soon lost itself in the thin grass of the cliffs. Not till I reached the verge did I pause to reconnoitre, and then at once all was displayed about me. I drew one deep delighted breath, and turned as my foremost duty to examine the way I had come. The village, yawning from its chimneys little early draughts of smoke, ran straight from the sea, perhaps for a quarter of a mile, under the shelter of a low, long hill on which a few sheep were folded. Beyond this hill, southwards, and divided from it by a deepish gorge, whose end I could see like a cut trough in the cliff edge, bulged another, the Abbot’s, the contour which gave it its name but roughly distinguishable at these closer quarters. The ruins we had passed overnight crowned this second slope near its marge; and inland both hills dropped into pastures, whence the ground rose again towards a rampart of thick woods which screened all Dunberry from the world beyond. It looked so endearing, such a happy valley of peace, one would scarcely have credited the picture with a single evil significance; yet--but I am not going to anticipate. Tingling with pleasure, I faced round to the sea.