“Hillo!  I have seen oysters grow on fruit-trees before now, but never an anchor in a rose-garden.”

“Silence, or my allegory will go to noggin-staves.”

“Against the rocks of my flinty discernment.”

“Pooh—­well.  Up comes duty like a jolly breeze, blowing dead from the northeast, and as bitter and cross as a northeaster too, and tugs me away toward Ireland.  I hold on by the rosebed—­any ground in a storm—­till every strand is parted, and off I go, westward ho! to get my throat cut in a bog-hole with Amyas Leigh.”

“Earnest, Will?”

“As I am a sinful man.”

“Well done, young hawk of the White Cliff!”

“I had rather have called it Gallantry Bower still, though,” said Will, punning on the double name of the noble precipice which forms the highest point of the deer park.

“Well, as long as you are on land, you know it is Gallantry Bower still:  but we always call it White Cliff when you see it from the sea-board, as you and I shall do, I hope, to-morrow evening.”

“What, so soon?”

“Dare we lose a day?”

“I suppose not:  heigh-ho!”

And they rode on again in silence, Amyas in the meanwhile being not a little content (in spite of his late self-renunciation) to find that one of his rivals at least was going to raise the siege of the Rose garden for a few months, and withdraw his forces to the coast of Kerry.

As they went over Bursdon, Amyas pulled up suddenly.

“Did you not hear a horse’s step on our left?”

“On our left—­coming up from Welsford moor?  Impossible at this time of night.  It must have been a stag, or a sownder of wild swine:  or may be only an old cow.”

“It was the ring of iron, friend.  Let us stand and watch.”

Bursdon and Welsford were then, as now, a rolling range of dreary moors, unbroken by tor or tree, or anything save few and far between a world-old furze-bank which marked the common rights of some distant cattle farm, and crossed then, not as now, by a decent road, but by a rough confused track-way, the remnant of an old Roman road from Clovelly dikes to Launceston.  To the left it trended down towards a lower range of moors, which form the watershed of the heads of Torridge; and thither the two young men peered down over the expanse of bog and furze, which glittered for miles beneath the moon, one sheet of frosted silver, in the heavy autumn dew.

“If any of Eustace’s party are trying to get home from Freshwater, they might save a couple of miles by coming across Welsford, instead of going by the main track, as we have done.”  So said Amyas, who though (luckily for him) no “genius,” was cunning as a fox in all matters of tactic and practic, and would have in these days proved his right to be considered an intellectual person by being a thorough man of business.

“If any of his party are mad, they’ll try it, and be stogged till the day of judgment.  There are bogs in the bottom twenty feet deep.  Plague on the fellow, whoever he is, he has dodged us!  Look there!”