My thought of the man I was pursuing had been
greatly changed. I conceived of him, somewhere in
front of me, upon his dangerous errand, not to be
turned aside, not to be stopped, by either fear or
reason. I had called him a ferret; I conceived him now
as a mad dog. Methought he would run, not walk;
methought, as he ran, that he would bark and froth at
the lips; methought, if the great wall of China were to
rise across his path, he would attack it with his
nails.
Presently the road left the down, returned by a
precipitous descent into the valley of the Stall, and
ran thenceforward among enclosed fields and under the
continuous shade of trees. I was told we had now
entered on the Carthew property. By and by, a
battlemented wall appeared on the left hand, and a
little after I had my first glimpse of the mansion. It
stood in a hollow of a bosky park, crowded, to a degree
that surprised and even displeased me, with huge timber
and dense shrubberies of laurel and rhododendron. Even
from this low station and the thronging neighbourhood
of the trees, the pile rose conspicuous like a
cathedral.
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