Clouds touched his face coldly; the nightly mists swept down and concealed the hills and valleys spread between. For a moment Ruddyford peeped, like a picture, from a frame of cobweb colour. Then it was hidden by sheets of rain. The man leapt off the grave of that other man, whose ashes in the morning of days had here been buried. So long had he stood motionless that it seemed as though a statue, set up to some vanished hero, grew suddenly incarnate, and, animated by the spirit of the mighty dead, now hastened from this uplifted loneliness down into the highways of life. A fierce torrent scourged the hill as the traveller hurried from it. He was drenched before he reached the farmhouse door. A dog ran out and growled and showed its teeth at him. Then, in answer to his knock, an old man came slowly down the stone-paved passage. "Ah, you'll be Mr. Daniel Brendon, no doubt? Your box was fetched up from Mary Tavy this marning. You catched that scat o' rain, I'm afraid. Come in an' welcome, an' I'll show you where you'm to lie." CHAPTER II RUDDYFORD A feature of Devon are those cultivated peninsulas of land that thrust forward up the surrounding coombs and point into Dartmoor's bosom. The foothills of this great tableland are fledged with forests and rich with fertile earth; but here and there, greatly daring, the farms have fought upward and reclaimed a little of the actual desolation. Ruddyford was driven like a wedge into that stony wilderness beneath the Moor's north-western ramparts. White Hill sheltered it from the west; the flank of Ger Tor sloped easterly; to the south flowed Tavy through fertile tilth, grey hamlets, and green woods. Only northward was little immediate shelter; and upon the north Daniel Brendon opened his eyes when dawned the first day of his new life.