urned off
into the heart of the moorlands that lay, rising and falling in irregular
undulations, between the sea and the hills. He was quickly out of sight
of Scarhaven, and in the midst of a solitude. All round him stretched
wide expanses of heather and gorse, broken up by great masses of rock:
from a rise in the road he looked about him and saw no sign of a human
habitation and heard nothing but the rush of the wind across the moors
and the plaintive cry of the sea-birds flapping their way to the
cultivated land beyond the barrier of hills. And from that point he saw
no sign of any fall or depression in the landscape to suggest the place
which he sought. But at the next turn he found himself at the mouth of a
narrow ravine, which cut deep into the heart of the hill, and was dark
and sombre enough to seem a likely place for secret meetings, if for
nothing more serious and sinister. It wound away from a little bridge
which carried the road over a brawling stream; along the side of that
stream were faint indications of a path which might have been made by
human feet, but was more likely to have been trodden out by the mountain
sheep. This path was quickly obscured by dwarf oaks and alder bushes,
which completely roofed in the narrow valley, and about everything hung a
suggestion of solitude that would have caused any timid or suspicious
soul to have turned back. But Copplestone was neither timid nor
suspicious, and he was already intensely curious about this adventure;
wherefore, grasping Peter Chatfield's oaken cudgel firmly in his right
hand, he jumped over the bridge and followed the narrow path into the
gloom of the trees.

He soon found that the valley resolved itself into a narrow and rocky
defile. The stream, level at first, soon came tumbling down amongst huge
boulders; the path disappeared; out of the oaks and alder high cliffs of
limestones began to lift themselves. The morning was unusually dark and
grey, even for October, and as leaves, brown and sere though they were,
still clustered thickly on the trees, Copplestone quickly found himself
in a gloom that would have made a nervous person frightened. He also
found that his forward progress became increasingly difficult. At the
foot of a tall cliff which suddenly rose up before him he was obliged to
pause; on that side of the stream it seemed impossible to go further. But
as he hesitated, peering here and there under the branches of the dwarf
oaks, he heard a v