The reconciliation made them both very happy, and after dinner—­to which the whole family, the shepherd and half a dozen labourers assembled, so that Tilda marvelled how, even with a fireplace so ample, Mrs. Tossell managed to cook for them all—­Arthur Miles boldly approached Chrissy and got her to persuade her sweetheart, Festus, to lend him a hook.  Armed with this, the children retraced their steps down the coombe.  The fog had lifted a little, and in the offing Holmness loomed out dimly, with a streak of golden light on the water beyond its westernmost cliffs.  But the boy nerved himself; he would not loiter to gaze at it, but strode into the cottage and began hacking with great fierceness at the nettles, which Tilda—­her hands cased in a pair of old pruning gloves—­gathered in skirtfuls and carried out of door.  Godolphus, in his joy at this restored amity, played at assisting Arthur Miles in his onslaught, barking and leaping at the nettles, yet never quite closely enough to endanger his sensitive nose.

They had been engaged thus for half an hour, perhaps, when they heard a horn sounded far up the coombe.  It had not the note of Mrs. Tossell’s dinner-horn; it seemed to travel, too, from a distance beyond the farm, and as Tilda listened, it was followed by a yet fainter sound, as of many dogs baying or barking together.  ’Dolph heard it, yapped excitedly, and made a dash out through the doorway.  But, when Tilda followed, the sounds had died away.  The coombe was silent save for the chatter of the fall and the mewing of an army of sea-gulls up the vale, where, on the farthest slope in sight, young Roger paced to and fro with a team of horses breaking up the stubble.

Tilda whistled ’Dolph back and fell to work again, filling her lap with nettles; but the load was scarcely complete before the dog, who had been whimpering and trembling with excitement, made another dash for the open, his yells all but drowning a thud of hooves with which a dark body hurled itself past the doorway, between the children and the sunshine, and so leapt clear for the beach over the fall.

Tilda, running to the doorway, saw the animal leap, but in so quick a flash that she noted nothing but its size, and mistook it for a riderless, runaway horse.  Then as it appeared again and with three bounds cleared the beach and plunged into the sea, she knew that it was no horse but a huge stag—­even such a stag as she had seen portrayed on menagerie posters—­a huge Exmoor stag leaping dark against the sun, but with a flame along the russet-gold ridge of his back and flame tipping his noble antlers as he laid them back and breasted the quiet swell of the waves.