Owing to Philip Stanburne's exile at Whittlecup, which had continued during the whole of the training, and to his natural shyness and timidity, which the extreme reclusion of his existence had allowed to become the permanent habit of his nature, he had made few acquaintances amongst the officers, and not one friend. There were several men in the regiment to know whom would have done Philip Stanburne a great deal of good, but he missed the opportunities which presented themselves. For instance, on the present occasion, though several of his brother officers, who, like himself, were not dancing, had gathered into a little group, Philip Stanburne avoided the group, and walked away by himself in the direction of the great dark wood. He felt the necessity for a little solitude; he had not been by himself during the whole day, and it was now nearly midnight. A man who is accustomed to be alone will steal out in that way from society to refresh himself in the loneliness which is his natural element--_pour se remettre_, as a Frenchman would express it. So he followed a narrow walk that led into the wood, and soon lost sight of the illuminations, whilst the music became gradually fainter, and at last was confined to such hints of the nature of the melody as could be gathered from the occasional fortissimo of a trumpet or the irregular booming of a drum. There was, as the reader already knows, a ravine behind Wenderholme Hall, which was a gash in the great hill that divided Wenderholme from Shayton. All this ravine was filled with a thick wood, and a stream came down the middle of it from the moorland above--a little noisy stream that tumbled over a good many small rocks, and made some cascades which the inhabitants of Wenderholme showed to all their visitors, and which lady visitors often more or less successfully sketched. By an outlay of about a hundred pounds, John Stanburne's grandfather had dammed this stream up in one conveniently narrow place, and made a small pond there, and the walk which Philip Stanburne was now following skirted the stream till it came to the pond's edge. It turned round the upper end of the tiny lake, and crossed the stream where it entered by means of a picturesque wooden bridge. From this bridge the Hall might be distinctly seen in the day-time; and Philip, remembering this, or perhaps merely from the habit of looking down towards the Hall when he crossed the bridge, stopped and looked, as if in the darkness of the night he could hope to distinguish any thing at the back of the house, which, of course, was not illuminated. Not illuminated! Why, the firework-men have applied a more effective device to the back of the house than the elaborate illumination of the front! They have invented a curling luminous cloud, these accomplished pyrotechnicians!