Publisher's Synopsis
When two or three additional hours had merged the same afternoon in evening, some movingoutlines might have been observed against the sky on the summit of a wild lone hill in that district.They circumscribed two men, having at present the aspect of silhouettes, sitting in a dog-cart andpushing along in the teeth of the wind. Scarcely a solitary house or man had been visible along thewhole dreary distance of open country they were traversing; and now that night had begun to fall, the faint twilight, which still gave an idea of the landscape to their observation, was enlivened by thequiet appearance of the planet Jupiter, momentarily gleaming in intenser brilliancy in front of them, and by Sirius shedding his rays in rivalry from his position over their shoulders. The only lightsapparent on earth were some spots of dull red, glowing here and there upon the distant hills, which, as the driver of the vehicle gratuitously remarked to the hirer, were smouldering fires for theconsumption of peat and gorse-roots, where the common was being broken up for agriculturalpurposes. The wind prevailed with but little abatement from its daytime boisterousness, three orfour small clouds, delicate and pale, creeping along under the sky southward to the Channel.Fourteen of the sixteen miles intervening between the railway terminus and the end of theirjourney had been gone over, when they began to pass along the brink of a valley some miles inextent, wherein the wintry skeletons of a more luxuriant vegetation than had hitherto surroundedthem proclaimed an increased richness of soil, which showed signs of far more careful enclosure andmanagement than had any slopes they had yet passed. A little farther, and an opening in the elmsstretching up from this fertile valley revealed a mansion.'That's Endelstow House, Lord Luxellian's, ' said the driver.'Endelstow House, Lord Luxellian's, ' repeated the other mechanically. He then turned himselfsideways, and keenly scrutinized the almost invisible house with an interest which the indistinctpicture itself seemed far from adequate to create. 'Yes, that's Lord Luxellian's, ' he said yet again aftera while, as he still looked in the same direction.'What, be we going there?''No; Endelstow Vicarage, as I have told you.''I thought you m't have altered your mind, sir, as ye have stared that way at nothing so long.''Oh no; I am interested in the house, that's all.''Most people be, as the saying is.''Not in the sense that I am.''Oh!...Well, his family is no better than my own, 'a b