They lay that night at Farnborough, whence they were to journey by way of Salisbury and Dorchester to Bridport, and there take boat for the Devon coast, crossing Lyme Bay to a little fishing village named Torquay, which was the point nearest to their destination on the moors. And all that they did, nor am I going to recount the details of the journey, which was sufficiently tedious and without event. But here one of their party would leave them, and there another, making for the big towns, until from Dorchester they two issued alone, and were so together till the end was reached. The weather all this time was fine but cold, and Brion took his destiny manfully, though sometimes his heart would fail him a little over the weariness of it all. But whatever he might think or feel, there was the paragon always at hand to hearten and entertain him, to paint the future in roseate colours or improve the present with tales of his own past prowess and extraordinary experiences. So at the end of four days they came into Devon, and found themselves towards a still bright evening riding into the little town of Ashburton, some three miles north of which lay the Moated Grange. CHAPTER IV. THE END OF THE JOURNEY At the _Golden Lion_ by the bull-ring the two halted to drink a sack-posset, for the boy was very spent and weary. Good fifteen miles had they ridden that last day, with three yet to cover to reach their journey’s end; yet his fatigue was as much of the mind as the body. The spirit which had sustained him throughout this long wayfaring seemed now, in the near achievement of its objective, to falter and lose heart. He realised all at once, as he had never yet done, his abysmal severance from the old familiar life. The thought came upon him with a force which certainly owed nothing to the dreariness or inhospitability of the country he was in, for it was a fair and friendly country, but to the felt unattainableness of his own. He was like a sleep-walker, who wakes to find himself naked and alone in spaces of impenetrable darkness, with his bed become a vague remoteness, a warm refuge impossible for his distraught mind ever again to locate or recover.