"And I dare say the reason why he came there was just as unromantic. As for Fever Lurgy, every village has its idiot who is a butt for rustic jokes."
"And what about old Father Abraham's mysterious disappearance?" I asked.
"What you call a mysterious disappearance," was her reply, "I regard as a sordid crime. I expect the old man had a little money hoarded up, some tramps heard of it, and, for the sake of that money, murdered him and threw his body over the cliff."
"At any rate," I said, "it is more pleasant to think that some mystery surrounded his life, and that he left the neighborhood from some romantic cause. Do you know, I am inclined to think that he is still alive, that he will turn up some day, and that the whole thing will be the talk of the countryside."
"And yet you are a trained lawyer, and have lived in London!" she laughed.
"Perhaps that is why. Lawyers get weary of hard thinking. Besides, when one comes to think of it, hard thinking is only responsible for a tithe of the discovery of truth. Far more of it is discovered by intuition than by logic."
"Do you know, you are very refreshing, Mr. Erskine. It is delightful to think of a man coming from hard, matter-of-fact London to Cornwall, and believing in the things that we simple rustics have discarded for a generation or more."
"Then you don't find life either romantic or mysterious?"
"I find it the most prosy, uninteresting thing imaginable. There is no mystery and no romance in the world; everything is hard, matter of fact, commonplace."
"Come, come, now, you cannot believe that," I laughed.