London, and of the figure of his father, a grave bearded man
who seemed always in a dream, as if he too sought for the vision of a
land beyond the strong walls, a land where there were deep orchards and
many shining hills, and fountains and water-pools gleaming under the
leaves of the wood.

'I believe my father earned his living,' he went on, 'such a living as
he did earn, at the Record Office and the British Museum. He used to
hunt up things for lawyers and country parsons who wanted old deeds
inspected. He never made much, and we were always moving from one
lodging to another--always to out-of-the-way places where everything
seemed to have run to seed. We never knew our neighbours--we moved too
often for that--but my father had about half a dozen friends, elderly
men like himself, who used to come to see us pretty often; and then, if
there was any money, the lodging-house servant would go out for beer,
and they would sit and smoke far into the night.

'I never knew much about these friends of his, but they all had the same
look, the look of longing for something hidden. They talked of mysteries
that I never understood, very little of their own lives, and when they
did speak of ordinary affairs one could tell that they thought such
matters as money and the want of it were unimportant trifles. When I
grew up and went into the City, and met other young fellows and heard
their way of talking, I wondered whether my father and his friends were
not a little queer in their heads; but I know better now.'

So night after night Darnell talked to his wife, seeming to wander
aimlessly from the dingy lodging-houses, where he had spent his boyhood
in the company of his father and the other seekers, to the old house
hidden in that far western valley, and the old race that had so long
looked at the setting of the sun over the mountain. But in truth there
was one end in all that he spoke, and Mary felt that beneath his words,
however indifferent they might seem, there was hidden a purpose, that
they were to embark on a great and marvellous adventure.

So day by day the world became more magical; day by day the work of
separation was being performed, the gross accidents were being refined
away. Darnell neglected no instruments that might be useful in the work;
and now he neither lounged at home on Sunday mornings, nor did he
accompany his wife to the Gothic blasphemy which pretended to be a
church. They had discovered a little chur