DOLBEARE.
A bright day, with a few fleecy clouds drifting before a west wind. A sky bright as that which overarches a young heart. The prospect as smiling as that which opens before youth. Barriers bathed in sunlight and indistinct in haze. Clouds without threat of rain casting cobalt-blue shadows.
The wild range of Dartmoor rose into peaks, with gullies seaming their sides, down which the Taw and the Ockments rushed foaming from their cradles. A glorious scene inviting exploration, an enchanted land calling the traveller to enter its seclusion and dispel its mysteries. Bathed in sunlight, enveloped in that finest haze that pervades the air on the brightest day in the West Country, who would suppose that all he saw was barrenness and naked desolation?
'Do you see that castle rising out of the woods?' asked Herring, pointing to some ruins of a keep on a hill to the left of the road, after they had passed Okehampton. 'That castle belonged to the Courtneys. There is a story of a certain Lady Howard who lived there in the reign of James I.'
'I have not heard of him. Was he an English king?'
'He was king of England. He was the father of the ill-fated Charles I.'
'I have heard of him. He married a French princess, so he comes into history.'
'Lady Howard was married four times; she had one daughter by her first husband, whom she hated.'
'Perhaps she only despised him because he was not noble, and had taken advantage of her poverty to marry her.'
'On the contrary, she was rich, an heiress, and her first husband was a son of the Earl of Northumberland.'