But straight before him all lay open, "clean away to the curve of the world" as he told himself, not without a pull of emotion remembering his impending voyage.

For, about sixty yards distant, the lawn ended abruptly in a hard straight line--the land cut off sheer, as it seemed, at the outer edge of a gravelled terrace, upon which two small antiquated cannon were mounted, their rusty muzzles trained over swirling blue-green tide river and yellow-grey, high-cambered sand-bar out to sea.
Between these innocuous engines of destruction, little black cannon balls had been piled into a mimic pyramid, near to which three men stood engaged in desultory conversation.

One of them, Tom observed as markedly taller, more commanding and distinguished in bearing, than his companions.

Even from here, the whole length of the lawn intervening, his presence, once noted, became of arresting importance, focussing attention as the central interest, the one thing which vitally mattered in this gracious scene--his figure silhouetted, vertically, against those long horizontal lines of river, sand-bar, and far-away delicate junction of opal-tinted sea with opal-tinted sky.
Whereupon Tom became convicted of the agreeable certainty that no disappointment awaited him.

His expectations were about to receive generous fulfilment.