“All I can tell them is, I am selling land.  It can’t be done in an hour.  I’m selling enough to pay them all twice over.  Gentlemen used to be able to wait till a man sold his acres for payment.  D—­n them! do they want my body, that they can’t let me alone for five minutes?”

The end of it was, that before a week Sir Bale told Feltram that he would go by boat, since that fellow insisted on it; and he did not very much care if he were drowned.

It was a beautiful autumnal day.  Everything was bright in that mellowed sun, and the deep blue of the lake was tremulous with golden ripples; and crag and peak and scattered wood, faint in the distance, came out with a filmy distinctness on the fells in that pleasant light.

Sir Bale had been ill, and sent down the night before for Doctor Torvey.  He was away with a patient.  Now, in the morning, he had arrived inopportunely.  He met Sir Bale as he issued from the house, and had a word with him in the court, for he would not turn back.

“Well,” said the Doctor, after his brief inspection, “you ought to be in your bed; that’s all I can say.  You are perfectly mad to think of knocking about like this.  Your pulse is at a hundred and ten; and, if you go across the lake and walk about Cloostedd, you’ll be raving before you come back.”

Sir Bale told him, apologetically, as if his life were more to his doctor than to himself, that he would take care not to fatigue himself, and that the air would do him good, and that in any case he could not avoid going; and so they parted.

Sir Bale took his seat beside Feltram in the boat, the sail was spread, and, bending to the light breeze that blew from Golden Friars, she glided from the jetty under Mardykes Hall, and the eventful voyage had begun.

CHAPTER XIX

Mystagogus

The sail was loosed, the boat touched the stone step, and Feltram sprang out and made her fast to the old iron ring.  The Baronet followed.  So! he had ventured upon that water without being drowned.  He looked round him as if in a dream.  He had not been there since his childhood.  There were no regrets, no sentiment, no remorse; only an odd return of the associations and fresh feelings of boyhood, and a long reach of time suddenly annihilated.

The little hollow in which he stood; the three hawthorn trees at his right; every crease and undulation of the sward, every angle and crack in the lichen-covered rock at his feet, recurred with a sharp and instantaneous recognition to his memory.