persistence. And her father looked round at her sharply, with an
impatient snap of the fingers, while Mrs. Trevennack's eye was fixed
on him now more carefully and more earnestly, Tyrrel observed, than
ever.

"I wonder why it is," Eustace Le Neve interposed, to spare Cleer's
feelings, "that so many high places, tops of mountains and so forth,
seem always to be dedicated to St. Michael in particular? He seems to
love such airy sites. There's St. Michael's Mount here, you know, and
Mont St. Michel in Normandy; and at Le Puy, in Auvergne, there's a St.
Michael's Rock, and at ever so many other places I can't remember this
minute."

Trevennack was in his element. The question just suited him. He smiled
a curious smile of superior knowledge. "You've come to the right place
for information," he said, blandly, turning round to the engineer.
"I'm a Companion of St. Michael and St. George myself, and my family,
as I told you, once owned St. Michael's Mount; so, for that and
various other reasons, I've made a special study of St. Michael the
Archangel, and all that pertains to him." And then he went on to give
a long and learned disquisition, which Le Neve and Walter Tyrrel only
partially followed, about the connection between St. Michael and the
Celtic race, as well as about the archangel's peculiar love for high
and airy situations. Most of the time, indeed, Le Neve was more
concerned in watching Cleer Trevennack's eyes, as her father spoke,
than in listening to the civil servant's profound dissertation. He
gathered, however, from the part he caught, that St. Michael the
Archangel had been from early days a very important and powerful
Cornish personage, and that he clung to high places on the tors and
rocks because he had to fight and subdue the Prince of the Air, whom