"It's Lord St. Levan's now, isn't it?" Le Neve put in, anxious to show
off his knowledge of the local aristocracy.

"Yes, they've made him Lord St. Levan," the dignified stranger
answered, with an almost imperceptible curl of his delicate lower lip.
"They've made him Lord St. Levan. The queen can make one anything. He
was plain Sir John St. Aubyn before that, you know; his family bought
the Mount from my ancestors--the Bassets of Tehidy. They're new people
at Marazion--new people altogether. They've only been there since
1660."

Le Neve smiled a quiet smile. That seemed to him in his innocence a
fairly decent antiquity as things go nowadays. But the dignified
stranger appeared to think so little of it that his new acquaintance
abstained from making note or comment on it. He waited half a moment
to see whether Cleer would speak again; he wanted to hear that
pleasant voice once more; but as she held her peace, he merely raised
his hat, and accepting the dismissal, continued his walk round the
cliffs alone. Yet, somehow, the rest of the way, the figure of that
statuesque stranger haunted him. He looked back once or twice. The
descendant of the Bassets of Tehidy had now resumed his high pedestal
upon the airy tor, and was gazing away seaward, like the mystic Great
Vision of his own Miltonic quotation, toward the Spanish coast,
wrapped round in a loose cloak of most poetic dimensions. Le Neve
wondered who he was, and what errand could have brought him there.

At the point called the Rill, he diverged from the path a bit, to get
that beautiful glimpse down into the rock-strewn cove and smooth white
sands at Kynance. A coastguard with brush and pail was busy as he