He was genuinely startled. About two hundred yards from the place where they sat a great ball of crimson-yellow fire, as big as a gipsy pot, rose slowly, waveringly, into the air. It was followed by five others, each one smaller than the one above it. They switched themselves towards the forest, and one by one they went out.
'It is only will-o'-the-wisps,' said Lotty, 'and they always bring good luck. Aren't you glad?'
'Very,' said Antony.
Then, hand in hand, as if very old acquaintances indeed, they resumed their journey. And, as they got nearer and nearer to the forest, the tall pine-trees, with brown, pillar-like limbs, grew higher and higher, and finally swallowed them up.
CHAPTER II.
HOW ANTONY HAPPENED TO BE THERE.
ANTONY BLAKE—or Frank Antony Blake, to give him the benefit of his full tally—was the only son and heir-apparent of Squire Blake of Manby Hall, a fine old mansion away down in Devonshire; thousands of acres of land—no one seemed to know how many—rolling fields of meadow-lands divided by hedgerows and waving grain, woods and wolds, lakes and streams, and an upland of heath and fern that lost itself far away on the nor'-western horizon.
The mansion itself, situated on a green eminence in the midst of the well-treed old park, was one of the stately homes of England; and though antique enough to be almost grim—as if holding in its dark interior the secrets of a gloomy or mayhap tragic past—it was cheerful enough in summer or winter; and from its big lodge-gates, all along its gravelled avenues, the wheel-marks bore evidence that Manby Hall was by no means deserted nor the squire very much of a recluse.
The gardens of this mansion were large enough to lose one's self in, silent save for the song of birds, with broad green walks, with bush and tree and flower, and fountains playing in the centre of ponds only and solely for the sake of the waterfowl or the gold and silver fish that hid themselves from the sunshine beneath the green, shimmering leaves of lordly floating lilies, orange and white.
A rural paradise was Manby Hall. Acres of glass too, a regiment of semi-silent gardeners, and a mileage of strong old walls around that were gay in springtime and summer with creeping, climbing, trailing flowers of every shape and shade.
If there was a single grim room in all this abode it was the library, where from tawny, leather-bound shelves the mighty tomes of authors long dead and gone frowned down on one, as one entered through the heavily draped doorways.