It reconciled Cleer to leaving London for awhile when she learnt that Eustace Le Neve was going north to Yorkshire, with Walter Tyrrel, to inspect the site of the proposed Wharfedale viaduct. Not that she ever mentioned his companion’s name in her father’s presence. Mrs. Trevennack had warned her many times over, with tears in her eyes, but without cause assigned, never to allude to Tyrrel’s existence before her father’s face; and Cleer, though she never for one moment suspected the need for such reticence, obeyed her mother’s injunction with implicit honesty. So they parted two ways, Eustace and Tyrrel for the north, the Trevennacks for Devonshire. Cleer needed a change indeed; she’d spent the best part of a year in London. And for Cleer, that was a wild and delightful holiday. Though Eustace wasn’t there, to be sure, he wrote hopefully from the north; he was maturing his ideas; he was evolving a plan; the sense of the magnitude of his stake in this attempt had given him an unwonted outburst of inspiration. As she wandered with her father among those boggy uplands, or stood on the rocky tors that so strangely crest the low flat hill-tops of the great Devonian moor. She felt a marvelous exhilaration stir her blood—the old Cornish freedom making itself felt through all the restrictions of our modern civilization. She was to the manner born, and she loved the Celtic West Country.

But to Michael Trevennack it was life, health, vigor. He hated London. He hated officialdom. He hated the bonds of red tape that enveloped him. It’s hard to know yourself an archangel—

  “One of the seven who nearest to the throne
   Stand ready at command, and are as eyes
   That run through all the heavens, or down to the earth,”
 

and yet to have to sit at a desk all day long, with a pen in your hand, in obedience to the orders of the First Lord of the Admiralty! It’s hard to know you can

  “Bear swift errands over moist and dry,
   O’er sea and land,”
 

as his laureate Milton puts it, and yet be doomed to keep still hour after hour in a stuffy office, or to haggle over details of pork and cheese in a malodorous victualing yard. Trevennack knew his “Paradise Lost” by heart—it was there, indeed, that he had formed his main ideas of the archangelic character; and he repeated the sonorous lines to himself, over and over again, in a ringing, loud voice, as he roamed the free moor or poised light on the craggy pinnacles. This was the world that he loved, these wild rolling uplands, these tall peaks of rock, these great granite boulders; he had loved them always, from the very beginning of things; had he not poised so of old, ages and ages gone by, on that famous crag

  “Of alabaster, piled up to the clouds,
   Conspicuous far, winding with one ascent
   Accessible from earth, one entrance high;
   The rest was craggy cliff that overhung
   Still as it rose, impossible to climb.”
 

So he had poised in old days; so he poised himself now, with Cleer by his side, an angel confessed, on those high tors of Dartmoor.

But amid all the undulations of that great stony ocean, one peak there was that delighted Trevennack’s soul more than any of the rest—a bold russet crest, bursting suddenly through the heathery waste in abrupt ascent, and scarcely to be scaled, save on one difficult side, like its Miltonic prototype. Even Cleer, who accompanied her father everywhere on his rambles, clad in stout shoes and coarse blue serge gown—. for Dartmoor is by no means a place to be approached by those who, like Agag, “walk delicately”—even Cleer didn’t know that this craggy peak, jagged and pointed like some Alpine or dolomitic aiguille, was known to all the neighboring shepherds around as St. Michael’s Tor, from its now forgotten chapel. A few wild Moorland sheep grazed now and again on the short herbage at its base; but for the most part father and daughter found themselves alone amid that gorse-clad solitude. There Michael Trevennack would stand erect, with head bare and brows knit, in the full eye of the sun, for hour after hour at a time, fighting the devil within him. And when he came back at night, tired out with his long tramp across the moor and his internal struggle, he would murmur to his wife, “I’ve conquered him to-day. It was a hard, hard fight! But I conquered! I conquered him!”

Up in the north, meanwhile, Eustace Le Neve worked away with a will at the idea for his viaduct. As he rightly wrote to Cleer, the need itself inspired him. Love is a great engineer, and Eustace learned fast from him. He was full of the fresh originality of youth; and the place took his fancy and impressed itself upon him. Gazing at it each day, there rose up slowly by degrees in his mind, like a dream, the picture of a great work on a new and startling principle—a modification of the cantilever to the necessities of the situation. Bit by bit he worked it out, and reduced his first floating conception to paper; then he explained it to Walter Tyrrel, who listened hard to his explanations, and tried his best to understand the force of the technical arguments. Enthusiasm is catching; and Le Neve was enthusiastic about his imaginary viaduct, till Walter Tyrrel in turn grew almost as enthusiastic as the designer himself over its beauty and utility. So charmed was he with the idea, indeed, that when Le Neve had at last committed it all to paper, he couldn’t resist the temptation of asking leave to show it to Sir Edward Jones, whom he had already consulted as to Eustace’s prospects.

Eustace permitted him, somewhat reluctantly, to carry the design to the great railway king, and on the very first day of their return to London, in the beginning of October, Tyrrel took the papers round to Sir Edward’s house in Onslow Gardens. The millionaire inspected it at first with cautious reserve. He was a good business man, and he hated enthusiasm—except in money matters. But gradually, as Walter Tyrrel explained to him the various points in favor of the design, Sir Edward thawed. He looked into it carefully. Then he went over the calculations of material and expense with a critical eye. At the end he leant back in his study chair, with one finger on the elevation and one eye on the figures, while he observed with slow emphasis: “This is a very good design. Why, man, its just about twenty times better than Erasmus Walker’s.”

“Then you think it may succeed?” Tyrrel cried, with keen delight, as anxious for Cleer’s sake as if the design were his own. “You think they may take it?”

“Oh dear, no,” Sir Edward answered, confidently, with a superior smile. “Not the slightest chance in the world of that. They’d never even dream of it. It’s novel, you see, novel, while Walker’s is conventional. And they’ll take the conventional one. But its a first rate design for all that, I can tell you. I never sa............