XIV. AT ARM'S LENGTH

XV. ST. MICHAEL DOES BATTLE




CHAPTER I.

A CORNISH LANDLORD.


"Then you don't care for the place yourself, Tyrrel?" Eustace Le Neve
said, musingly, as he gazed in front of him with a comprehensive
glance at the long gray moor and the wide expanse of black and stormy
water.

"It's bleak, of course; bleak and cold, I grant you; all this upland
plateau about the Lizard promontory seems bleak and cold everywhere;
but to my mind it has a certain wild and weird picturesqueness of its
own for all that. It aims at gloominess. I confess in its own way I
don't dislike it."

"For my part," Tyrrel answered, clinching his hand hard as he spoke,
and knitting his brow despondently, "I simply hate it. If I wasn't the
landlord here, to be perfectly frank with you, I'd never come near
Penmorgan. I do it for conscience' sake, to be among my own people.
That's my only reason. I disapprove of absenteeism; and now the land's
mine, why, I must put up with it, I suppose, and live upon it in spite
of myself. But I do it against the grain. The whole place, if I tell