And so he lived and learned, being trained without severity and indulged without hurt, a mystery and object of curiosity to the neighbours, with whom, nevertheless, scandal could get no hold, seeing that the Vicar himself, even had he been inveigled into telling, had nothing to tell. The child had been brought by an uncommunicative stranger, was there, and that was all. For the rest, the business was a lawyer’s business. Now, it was somewhere about the boy’s sixth year when occurred that momentary lifting and dropping of the veil referred to; and by then whatever memories of a brief past he had brought with him into exile had long flickered into extinction. For all that survived to his mind he might have drawn his first breath in the house to which destiny had consigned him. This house stood a little off the great west road by which the Queen’s Majesty would sometimes travel from Westminster to her Palace of Richmond in Surrey. It was a reasonably modest building, meet to the circumstances of an unbeneficed cleric, but with a pleasant garden croft attached, as well as an orchard, and a paddock which served for a playground. A bridle-track went from it down to the road, where was a swing-gate; and it was here that Brion, returning alone from an errand voluntarily run for his good-natured foster-mother--in whose unmethodicalness and forgetfulness he took, even thus early, a chuckling amusement--came for the first time upon the man who brought, though the boy did not know it, the periodic instalments of pieces to pay for his keep. Seeing him, he stopped, and the two looked at one another. They looked, and the man’s face took on a queer expression, arrested and questioning. His eyes were light jellies, with pupils that somehow reminded Brion of the black staring pits in the frog-spawn he was used to fish out of the ponds. He was extraordinarily lank and bony, though with a suggestion of sinewy swagger about him that was quite impressive until one examined his features; and then conviction halted. They seemed to betray an odd mixture of impudence and weakness, the two seeming epitomised, as it were, in the near conjunction of a slack mouth and an inverted moustache brushed boldly up from it to meet the nostrils of a long down-drooping nose. He wore a black bonnet with a short feather in it, and hose, breeches, and curtmanteau all black, as befitted a lawyer’s deputy. On his body was a peascod breastplate, more dull than polished, a short sword hung at his thigh, and he bestrode a heavy Flanders horse, plainly caparisoned. He had been in the act of dismounting at the moment of the boy’s appearance, but, seeing him, subsided again into his saddle and sat staring. Suddenly, as if to some instinct, he pulled off his cap and louted to the little fellow, who responded with a grave ‘Good-morrow, stranger.’