glance at Cleer, as they called the daughter. He wasn't sorry indeed
for the chance of having a second look at her.

"Why Land's End, of course," the dignified stranger answered at once,
descending from his perch as he spoke, with a light spring more like a
boy's than a mature man's. "You must surely know those famous lines in
'Lycidas' about
'The fable of Bellerus old,
Where the Great Vision of the guarded mount
Looks towards Namancos and Bayona's hold;
Look homeward, angel, now, and melt with ruth.'"

"Yes, I KNOW them, of course," Eustace answered with ingenuous
shyness; "but as so often happens with poetry, to say the truth, I'm
afraid I attached no very definite idea to them. The music so easily
obscures the sense; though the moment you suggest it, I see they can't
possibly mean anyone but St. Michael."

"My father's very much interested in the antiquities of Cornwall," the
girl Cleer put in, looking up at him somewhat timidly; "so he
naturally knows all these things, and perhaps he expects others to
know them unreasonably."

"We've every ground for knowing them," the father went on, glancing
down at her with tender affection. "We're Cornish to the backbone--
Cornish born and bred, if ever there were Cornishmen. Every man of my
ancestors was a Tre, Pol, or Pen, to the tenth generation backward;
and I'm descended from the Bassets, too--the Bassets of Tehidy. You
must have heard of the Bassets in Cornish history. They owned St.
Michael's Mount before these new-fangled St. Aubyn people."