you the truth, is simply detestable to me."

He leaned on his stick as he spoke, and looked down gloomily at the
heather. A handsome young man, Walter Tyrrel, of the true Cornish
type--tall, dark, poetical-looking, with pensive eyes and a thick
black mustache, which gave dignity and character to his otherwise
almost too delicately feminine features. And he stood on the open moor
just a hundred yards outside his own front door at Penmorgan, on the
Lizard peninsula, looking westward down a great wedge-shaped gap in
the solid serpentine rock to a broad belt of sea beyond without a ship
or a sail on it. The view was indeed, as Eustace Le Neve admitted, a
somewhat bleak and dreary one. For miles, as far as the eye could
reach, on either side, nothing was to be seen but one vast heather-
clad upland, just varied at the dip by bare ledges of dark rock and a
single gray glimpse of tossing sea between them. A little farther on,
to be sure, winding round the cliff path, one could open up a glorious
prospect on either hand over the rocky islets of Kynance and Mullion
Cove, with Mounts Bay and Penzance and the Land's End in the distance.
That was a magnificent site--if only his ancestors had had the sense
to see it. But Penmorgan House, like most other Cornish landlords'
houses, had been carefully placed--for shelter's sake, no doubt--in a
seaward hollow where the view was most restricted; and the outlook one
got from it, over black moor and blacker rocks, was certainly by no
means of a cheerful character. Eustace Le Neve himself, most cheery
and sanguine of men, just home from his South American railway-laying,
and with the luxuriant vegetation of the Argentine still fresh in his
mind, was forced to admit, as he looked about him, that the position
of his friend's house on that rolling brown moor was far from a
smiling one.