“Chris Blanchard,” he said shortly, “though that won’t interest you.”

“But it does—­a good deal.  I’ve wondered, some time, why I didn’t hear my own brother was going to marry her.  He got struck all of a heap there, to my certain knowledge.  However, he ’s escaped.  The Lord be good to you, and I take my advice to marry back again.  Think twice, if she’s made of the same stuff as her brother.”

“No, by God!  Is the moon made of the same stuff as the marsh lights?”

Concentrated bitterness rang in the words, and a man much less acute than Grimbal had guessed he stood before an enemy of Will.  John saw the bee-keeper start at this crucial moment; he observed that Hicks had said a thing he much regretted and uttered what he now wished unspoken.  But the confession was torn bare and laid out naked under Grimbal’s eyes, and he knew that another man besides himself hated Will.  The discovery made his face grow redder than usual.  He pulled at his great moustache and thrust it between his teeth and gnawed it.  But he contrived to hide the emotion in his mind from Clement Hicks, and the other did not suspect, though he regretted his own passion.  Grimbals next words further disarmed him.  He appeared to know nothing whatever about Will, though his successful rival interested him still.

“They call the man Jack-o’-Lantern, don’t they?  Why?”

“I can’t tell you.  It may be, though, that he is erratic and uncertain in his ways.  You cannot predict what he will do next.”

“That’s nothing against him.  He’s farming on the Moor now, isn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“Where did he come from when he dropped out of the clouds to marry Phoebe Lyddon?”

The question was not asked with the least idea of its enormous significance.  Grimbal had no notion that any mystery hung over that autumn time during which he made love to Phoebe and Will was absent from Chagford.  He doubted not that for the asking he could learn how Will had occupied himself; but the subject did not interest him, and he never dreamed the period held a secret.  The sudden consternation bred in Hicks by this question astounded him not a little.  Indeed, each man amazed the other, Grimbal by his question, Hicks by the attitude which he assumed before it.

“I’m sure I haven’t the least idea,” he answered; but his voice and manner had already told Grimbal all he cared to learn at the moment; and that was more than his wildest hopes had even risen to.  He saw in the other’s face a hidden thing, and by his demeanour that it was an important one.  Indeed, the bee-keeper’s hesitation and evident alarm before this chance question proclaimed the secret vital.  For the present, and before Clement’s evident alarm, Grimbal dismissed the matter lightly; but he chose to say a few more words upon it, for the express purpose of setting Hicks again at his ease.

“You don’t like your future brother-in-law?”