A cheery shout answered him: ‘The Moated Grange--ha!’ and in the same moment his rein was caught by his companion, and they stopped. He might scarcely give a sigh of joy, though discerning with his dim eyes only shadow and confusion, when the other leapt to the ground, and he heard the furious battering of his sword-hilt on echoing wood. Then after an interval came a great flare of light, and a sense of figures gesticulating in a swirl of red smoke, and of voices in deep altercation. Whereafter he remembered nothing more, but only a sigh of yielding and collapse, followed by a stillness which at first seemed the rest of heaven, until things began to move in it, and faces to appear, and inarticulate voices to babble and rage. He wearied to escape them, to get deep down underground where he would find peace and utter silence; but they came between, and forced him to stay and listen. Then suddenly he was raised, for all that he felt himself turned to a stone figure, heavy and enormous, with nothing alive in him but his brain, and a gush of molten fire went down his throat, setting him all ablaze. Sparks poured from his eyes; he could hear his whole being crackling within like a burning gorse-bush--faster and faster, while he whirled about in a mad frenzy. At the height, a flood of warm water was flung, which extinguished the flames in a moment, and, released and blissful, he sank away into an oblivion as sweet as death. CHAPTER V. THE HOUSE BY THE MOOR With a snore like the grinding on shingle of a boat’s nose which has been run ashore at the end of a long smooth journey, Brion opened his eyes from a period of the profoundest repose he had ever enjoyed in his life. All the fever and the weariness were gone from him, though a strange sense of lightness and giddiness had succeeded, so that he lay blinking and yawning, incurious about his situation, and contentedly waiting for it to develop itself as it listed. There is a self-healing balm in the ‘liquid dew of youth’ whose essence is a short memory, for when an evil is forgotten it is over. Yesterday’s fret and exhaustion were no more to the boy now than the bed on which his body rested--a pretext to luxuriate; and he remained as he was until the balance between pleasure and curiosity insensibly inclining the latter’s way spoiled the blissful equilibrium, when he sat up, all at once actively interested in his surroundings.