The speed of the little party was the speed of Brion, but they made what haste they could, for dusk was closing down, and the road none too free of dangers. At first Bagott would have the boy to ride with him, part for kindness’ sake, and part to draw from him the particulars of his past life; but soon his questions lapsed into vagueness, and he sunk into a preoccupation which lost account of everything but its own dark melancholy. So Brion rode alone, Master Clerivault lacking any invitation to join him, and indulged his own unhappy fancies--which the cold wind and the gloomy road did nothing to assuage--to the limit of their bent. To be uprooted in a moment from that kindly soil, delivered to a relative of whose existence he had never even guessed hitherto, haled out into the night and the world, with an unknown future before him--it needed the utmost of his young resolution to bear up under such a battery of strokes. Sometimes, seizing him in gusts and spasms, his fate would seem to be monstrous, impossible, a nightmare from which he would waken in a little to hear Gregory breathing placidly in his bed by the window that overlooked the quiet garden; sometimes, realising the truth, he would be almost irresistibly moved to turn his horse’s head, and gallop desperately back the way he had come. But he had a high spirit to conquer, and a reason effectively to dismiss, such vain impulses. Yet, though he rode stiff, his chin up, his heart was full of misery and his soul of longing.