Brion looked about him. He lay in his shift in a comfortable bed, the appointments of the room were plain and clean, fresh rushes strewed the floor, and there was a great bunch of rosemary on the window-sill. Moreover, it was the morning of the day as of his own young life, and, pay what dole he would to sorrow, a sense of exhilaration would rise in him, to paint his fancy with bright anticipation. After all, a beard and a gruff voice came early to the stripling in Elizabeth’s time, and, though they were not yet for him, he was near enough to manhood, as they read it, to hear, in his mind’s ear, its distant shout to enterprise and glory. Suddenly he wanted to be up and afoot; but there was some curiosity to feed first. ‘I remember not my passage hither,’ he said. ‘Sense and memory were out of thee,’ replied the other, tapping his head twice. ‘Might have fired a great culverin in thy ear, and not awakened thee. I carried thee--ha! in these arms.’ ‘Master Clerivault,’ said the boy, ‘will it please you to tell me?’ ‘Anything,’ was the answer, ‘that my reason and my honour permits.’ ‘Who and what art thou, then?’ ‘Who but Harlequin Clerivault, please your Grace, some time gentleman of fortune, and since confidant and right-hand man to thine Uncle. He hangs on me, ha!’ ‘His confidant, say you? In what way of speaking, Master Clerivault?’ ‘In the law’s way of speaking, Sir, which is to say that, being a Judge, he hath judged most excellently of a paragon.’ ‘Yourself, to wit?’ ‘Thou hast said it, not I.’ ‘What is it to be a paragon?’ ‘It is to be the best of one’s kind, Sir, as a king most kingly, as a knight most knightly, as a retainer the most capable and to be trusted; to which mental graces those of the body should figure, as it were, in apposition, whereby a straight leg should express honesty, an arched brow love, or attachment, a chin slightly receding forbearance, and a fine shape signify proportion in all. Possessing the sum of which endowments, a man may call himself superlative, which is to be a paragon.’ His lids half closed; he pointed his moustache with an inimitable air. The corners of Brion’s mouth flickered. ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘And of all that my uncle was the judge? I think he must be a great Judge, Master Clerivault.’ ‘Great in judgment,’ answered the paragon, ‘but, alack, no longer a great Judge or a Judge at all.’ ‘Not a Judge?’ ‘We have resigned, Sir, our Commission. Let it rest at that. The question drops--in Law, _cadit quæstio_.’ Brion felt a momentary stupefaction; yet, after all, the news told him nothing where he knew nothing. After a brief consideration, he continued:-- ‘Why do we stay here, Master Clerivault? Has not my uncle a house?’ The man coughed before answering:-- ‘Ay, and to which we are wending.’ ‘In London?’ ‘Not so; but westwards in Devon--where his family was used to dwell. ’Tis called the Moated Grange.’