“So that’s your tutor’s house, is it?” said Brandon, and thereupon he took leave of him.

“Amazing!” he said to himself as he walked away.  “What next, I wonder?”

As he returned he revolved this information in his mind with increasing surprise.  John Mortimer had a proud and confident way of talking about his father that did not sound as if he knew that he had begun life by running away from home.  Valentine, he was well aware, knew nothing about it.

Coming on, he turned aside to talk to some men who were digging a well.  He knew how to talk to working people, and, what is more to the purpose, he knew how to make them talk; but though they proffered a good deal of information about the neighbourhood, nothing was said that gave him any of the knowledge he wanted.  And shortly he went on, and let himself in at the little gate with his key.  It was not yet eleven o’clock, and as he did not want to see the ladies of the family so soon, he determined to go down into the steep glen and look about him.

He had no doubt now that to this place the superstitious story belonged.

First, he skirted it all about.  From above it was nearly as round as a cup, and as deep in proportion to its size.  The large old trees had been left, and appeared almost to fill it up, their softly rounded heads coming to within three feet of the level where he stood.  All the mother birds—­rooks, jays, thrushes, and pigeons—­were plainly in view under him, as they sat brooding on their nests among the topmost twigs, and there was a great cawing and crowing of the cock-birds while they flew about and fed their mates.  The leaves were not out; their buds only looked like green eggs spotting the trees, excepting that here and there a horse-chestnut, forwarder than its brethren, was pushing its crumpled foliage out of the pale-pink sheath.  Everywhere saplings had been cut down, and numbers of them strewed the damp mossy ground; but light penetrated, and water trinkled, there was a pleasant scent of herbs and flowers, and the whole place was cheerful with growth and spring.

A set of winding steps cut in the soft, red rock led into the glen just where the side was steepest, and Brandon, intent on discovery, sprang lightly down them.  He wandered almost everywhere about the place.  It seemed to hold within itself a different climate from the world above, where keen spring air was stirring; here hardly a breath moved, and in the soft sheltered warmth the leaves appeared visibly to be expanding.  He forgot his object, also another object that he had in view (the business, in fact, which had brought him), leaned against the trunk of a horse-chestnut, listened to the missel-thrushes, looked at a pine-tree a little way off, that was letting down a mist of golden dust, and presently lost himself in a reverie, finding, as is the way with a lover, that the scene present, whatever it may happen to be, was helping to master his everyday self, was indeed just the scene to send him plunging yet further down into the depths of his passionate dream.