"You are too fond of discerning pleasant motives," she had once said to him. "I daresay they are all right, but it takes such a time to see them." He had not seen her since the outbreak, and he was rather anxious as to her opinion; but the main thing was to be with her. Since last Sunday he had been, he confessed to himself, absurd. He had behaved more in the manner of a boy of nineteen than a middle-aged widower of forty-five. He had been suddenly afraid of the Bethels--going to tea had seemed such an obvious advance on his part that he had shrunk from it, and he had even avoided Bethel lest that gentleman should imagine that he was on the edge of a proposal for his daughter's hand. He thought that all the world must know of it, and he blushed like a girl at the thought of its being laid bare for Pendragon to laugh and gibe it. It was so precious, so wonderful, that he kept it, like a rich piece of jewellery, deep in a secret drawer, over which he watched delightedly, almost humorously, secure in the delicious knowledge that he alone had the key. He wandered out at night, like a foolish schoolboy, to watch the lamp in her room--that dull circle of golden light against the blind seemed to draw him with it into the intimacy and security of her room. On one of his solitary afternoon walks he suddenly came upon her. He had gone, as he so often did, over the moor to the Four Stones; he chose that place partly because of the Stones themselves and partly because of the wonderful view. It seemed to him that the whole heart of Cornwall--its mystery, its eternal sameness, its rejection of everything that was modern and ephemeral, the pathos of old deserted altars and past gods searching for their old-time worshippers--was centred there. The Stones themselves stood on the hill, against the sky, gaunt, grey, menacing, a landmark for all the country-side. The moor ran here into a valley between two lines of hill, a cup bounded on three sides by the hills and on the fourth by the sea. In the spring it flamed, a bowl of fire, with the gorse; now it stood grim and naked to all the winds, blue in the distant hills, a deep red to the right, where the plough had been, brown and grey on the moor itself running down to the sea. It was full of deserted things, as is ever the way with the true Cornwall. On the hill were the Stones sharp against the sky-line; lower down, in a bend of the valley, stood the ruins of a mine, the shaft and chimney, desolately solitary, looking like the pillars of some ancient temple that had been fashioned by uncouth worshippers. In the valley itself stood the stones of what was once a chapel--built, perhaps, for the men of the desolate mine, inhabited now by rabbits and birds, its windows spaces where the winds that swept the moor could play their eternal, restless games.