“By gor! not hard enough by a powerful deal,” said Billy.

“Not hard on youth; but this match, so to call it, looks like mere moonshine.  Theer ’s nought to it I can see—­both childer, and neither with as much sense as might sink a floatin’ straw.”

“We love each other wi’ all our hearts and have done more ’n half a year.  Ban’t that nothing?”

“I married when I was forty-two,” remarked the miller, reflectively, looking down at his fox-head slippers, the work of Phoebe’s fingers.

“An’ a purty marryin’ time tu!” declared Mr. Blee.  “Look at me,” he continued, “parlous near seventy, and a bacherlor-man yet.”

“Not but Widow Comstock will have ’e if you ax her a bit oftener.  Us all knows that,” said the young lover, with great stratagem.

Billy chuckled, and rubbed his wrinkles.

“Time enough, time enough,” he answered, “but you—­scarce out o’ clouts—­why, ‘t is playin’ at a holy thing, that’s what ’t is—­same as Miss Phoebe, when she was a li’l wee cheel, played at bein’ parson in her night-gownd, and got welted for it, tu, by her gude faither.”

“We ’m both in earnest anyway—­me and Phoebe.”

“So am I,” replied the miller, sitting up and putting down his pipe; “so am I in earnest, and wan word ’s gude as a hunderd in a pass like this.  You must hear the truth, an’ that never broke no bones.  You ’m no more fitted to have a wife than that tobacco-jar—­a hot-headed, wild-fire of a bwoy—­”

“A right Jack-o’-Lantern, as everybody knaws,” suggested Mr. Blee.

“Ess fay, ’tis truth.  Shifting and oncertain as the marsh gallopers on the moor bogs of a summer night.  Awnly a youth’s faults, you mind; but still faults.  No, no, my lad, you’ve got to fight your life’s battle and win it, ‘fore you’m a mate for any gal; an’ you’ve got to begin by fightin’ yourself, an’ breaking an’ taming yourself, an’ getting yourself well in hand.  That’s a matter of more than months for the best of us.”

“And then?” said Will, “after ‘tis done? though I’m not allowin’ I’m anything but a ripe man as I stand here afore you now.”

“Then I’d say, ’I’m glad to see you grawed into a credit to us all, Will Blanchard, and worth your place in the order o’ things; but you doan’t marry Phoebe Lyddon—­never, never, never, not while I’m above ground.’”

His slow eyes looked calmly and kindly at Will, and he smiled into the hot, young, furious face.

“That’s your last word then?”

“It is, my lad.”

“And you won’t give a reason?”

“The reason is, ‘what’s bred in the bone comes out in the flesh.’  I knawed your faither.  You’m as volatile as him wi’out his better paarts.”

“Leave him wheer he lies—­underground.  If he’d lived ‘stead of bein’ cut off from life, you’d ‘a’ bin proud to knaw him.”

“A gypsy-man and no better, Will,” said Mr. Blee.  “Not but what he made a gude end, I allow.”