each such occasion she would plunge into the conversation, taking such a part in it as to show that, whatever had been her abstracted thought, her senses had taken in fully all that had gone on around her.  Towards myself her manner was strange.  Sometimes it was marked by a distance, half shy, half haughty, which was new to me.  At other times there were moments of passion in look and gesture which almost made me dizzy with delight.  Little, however, of a marked nature transpired during the journey.  There was but one episode which had in it any element of alarm, but as we were all asleep at the time it did not disturb us.  We only learned it from a communicative guard in the morning.  Whilst running between Dawlish and Teignmouth the train was stopped by a warning given by someone who moved a torch to and fro right on the very track.  The driver had found on pulling up that just ahead of the train a small landslip had taken place, some of the red earth from the high bank having fallen away.  It did not however reach to the metals; and the driver had resumed his way, none too well pleased at the delay.  To use his own words, the guard thought “there was too much bally caution on this ‘ere line!’”

We arrived at Westerton about nine o’clock in the evening.  Carts and horses were in waiting, and the work of unloading the train began at once.  Our own party did not wait to see the work done, as it was in the hands of competent people.  We took the carriage which was in waiting, and through the darkness of the night sped on to Kyllion.

We were all impressed by the house as it appeared in the bright moonlight.  A great grey stone mansion of the Jacobean period; vast and spacious, standing high over the sea on the very verge of a high cliff.  When we had swept round the curve of the avenue cut through the rock, and come out on the high plateau on which the house stood, the crash and murmur of waves breaking against rock far below us came with an invigorating breath of moist sea air.  We understood then in an instant how well we were shut out from the world on that rocky shelf above the sea.

Within the house we found all ready.  Mrs. Grant and her staff had worked well, and all was bright and fresh and clean.  We took a brief survey of the chief rooms and then separated to have a wash and to change our clothes after our long journey of more than four-and-twenty hours.

We had supper in the great dining-room on the south side, the walls of which actually hung over the sea.  The murmur came up muffled, but it never ceased.  As the little promontory stood well out into the sea, the northern side of the house was open; and the due north was in no way shut out by the great mass of rock, which, reared high above us, shut out the rest of the world.  Far off across the bay we could see the trembling lights of the castle, and here and there along the shore the faint light of a fisher’s window.  For the rest the sea was a dark blue plain with an occasional flicker of light as the gleam of starlight fell on the slope of a swelling wave.