the day. The yellow
stubbles, the green meadows, the ploughed lands similarly spun before
him and whirled up to meet the sky. As he re-entered the village a
butcher's cart nearly knocked him down. Hope rose in a glorious new
sunrise--the hope that he had believed was set for ever. Then, passing
that former home of Clement Hicks and his mother, did Grimbal feel great
fear and misgiving. The recollection of Chris and her love for the dead
man chilled him. He remembered his own love for Chris when he thought
she must be dead. He told himself that he must hope nothing; he repeated
to himself how fulfilment of his desire, now revived after long sleep,
might still be as remote as when Chris Blanchard said him nay in the
spring wastes under Newtake five years and more ago. His head dinned
this upon his heart; but his heart would not believe and responded with
a sanguine song of great promise.

CHAPTER III

ANSWERED

At a spot in the woods some distance below Newtake, Martin Grimbal sat
and waited, knowing she whom he sought must pass that way. He had called
at the farm and been welcomed by Phoebe. Will was on the peat beds, and,
asking after Chris, he learnt that she had gone into the valley to pick
blackberries and dewberries, where they already began to ripen in the
coombs.

Under aisles of woodland shadows he sat, where the river murmured down
mossy stairs of granite in a deep dingle. Above him, the varying foliage
of oak and ash and silver birch was already touched with autumn, and
trembled into golden points where bosses of pristine granite, crowned
with the rowan's scarlet harvest, arose above their luxuriance. The
mellow splendour of these forests extended to the river's brink, along
which towered noble masses of giant osmunda, capped by seed spears of
tawny red. Here and there gilded lances splashed into the stream or
dotted its still pools with scattered sequins of sunshine, where light
winnowed through the dome of the leaves; and at one spot, on a wrinkled
root that wound crookedly from the alder into the river, there glimmered
a halcyon, like an opal on a miser's bony finger. From above the
tree-tops there sounded cynic bird-laughter, and gazing upwards Martin
saw a magpie flaunt his black and white plumage across the valley; while
at hand the more musical merriment of a woodpecker answered him.

Then a little child's laugh came to his ear, rippling along with the
note of the babbling water, and one mo