abited
land appeared anywhere. "A trifle dreary hereabouts, Mr. Armadale," said
the ever-cheerful Pedgift. "But we are just out of it now. Look ahead,
sir! Here we are at Hurle Mere."

The reeds opened back on the right hand and the left, and the boat
glided suddenly into the wide circle of a pool. Round the nearer half
of the circle, the eternal reeds still fringed the margin of the water.
Round the further half, the land appeared again, here rolling back from
the pool in desolate sand-hills, there rising above it in a sweep of
grassy shore. At one point the ground was occupied by a plantation, and
at another by the out-buildings of a lonely old red brick house, with
a strip of by-road near, that skirted the garden wall and ended at the
pool. The sun was sinking in the clear heaven, and the water, where the
sun's reflection failed to tinge it, was beginning to look black and
cold. The solitude that had been soothing, the silence that had felt
like an enchantment, on the other Broad, in the day's vigorous prime,
was a solitude that saddened here--a silence that struck cold, in the
stillness and melancholy of the day's decline.

The course of the boat was directed across the Mere to a creek in the
grassy shore. One or two of the little flat-bottomed punts peculiar
to the Broads lay in the creek; and the reed cutters to whom the punts
belonged, surprised at the appearance of strangers, came out, staring
silently, from behind an angle of the old garden wall. Not another sign
of life was visible anywhere. No pony-chaise had been seen by the reed
cutters; no stranger, either man or woman, had approached the shores of
Hurle Mere that day.

Young Pedgift took another look at his watch, and addressed himself to
Miss Milroy. "You may, or may not, see the governess when you get back
to Thorpe Ambrose," he said; "but, as the time stands now, you won't
see her here. You know best, Mr. Armadale," he added, turning to Allan,
"whether your friend is to be depended on to keep his appointment?"

"I am certain he is to be depended on," replied Allan, looking about
him--in unconcealed disappointment at Midwinter's absence.

"Very good," pursued Pedgift Junior. "If we light the fire for our gypsy
tea-making on the open ground there, your friend may find us out, sir,
by the smoke. That's the Indian dodge for picking up a lost man on the
prairie, Miss Milroy and it's pretty nearly wild enough (isn't it?) to
be a prairie here!"

There