connected with his health, had
arranged with Sir Francis Ladelle and the Doctor to come and stay at the
Mount, where he was to have a comfortable home and the Doctor's
attendance, a moderate stipend, and, in exchange, to help on the two
lads in their studies every morning, the rest of the day being his own.

The plan had worked admirably; for Mr Deane was an earnest, able man,
with a great love of learning, and always ready to display a warm
friendship for boy or man who possessed similar tastes. The lads liked
him: he was always firm, but kindly; and he possessed that wonderful
power of imparting the knowledge he possessed, never seeming at a loss
for means to explain some puzzling expression in classic lore, or
mathematical problem, so as to impress it strongly upon his pupil's
mind.

The morning he uttered the words at the beginning of this chapter he was
seated with the two boys in the long, low library at the Mount, whose
heavy windows looked out upon a great, thick, closely-cropped yew hedge,
which made the room dark and gloomy, for it completely shut off all view
of the western sea, though at the same time it sheltered the house from
the tremendous gales which swept over the island from time to time.

It was the morning after the discovery in so unpleasant a manner of the
hole at the foot of the slope, and their projected visit of
investigation in the afternoon so filled the lads' heads that there did
not seem to be any room for study; and, in consequence, after patiently
bearing the absence of mind and inattention of his pupils for a long
time, the tutor began to be fidgety and, in spite of his placid nature,
annoyed.

The Latin reading and rendering went on horribly, and the mathematics
worse. Vince tried hard; but as soon as he began to write down _a_ +
_b_--_c_ = the square root of _x_, his mind wandered away to the rocks
over the Black Scraw. For that root of _x_ was so suggestive: _x_
represented the unknown quantity, and the Black Scraw was the unknown
quantity of which he wanted to get to the root; and, over and over
again, when the tutor turned to him, it was to find the boy, pen in
hand, but with the ink in it dried up, while he sat gazing straight
before him at imaginary grottoes and caverns, lit up by lanthorns which
cast the black shadows of two explorers behind them on the
water-smoothed granite floor.

But this did not apply only to Vince, for Mike was acting in a similar
way; and at the