After breakfast Chris busied herself indoors and occupied her quick fingers in putting a dozen finishing touches; while Mrs. Blanchard walked round the farm beside Will, viewed with outspoken approval or secret distrust those evidences of success and failure spread about her, and passed the abandoned attempt to reclaim land without a word or sign that she remembered.  Will crowed like a happy child; his mother poured advice into his unheeding ears; and then a cart lumbered up with a great surprise in it.  True to her intention Mrs. Blanchard had chosen the day of Phoebe ’s arrival to send the old piano to Newtake, and now it was triumphantly trundled into the parlour, while Will protested and admired.  It added not a little to the solid splendour of the apartment, and Mrs. Blanchard viewed it with placid but genuine satisfaction.  Its tarnished veneer and red face looked like an old honest friend, so Will declared, and he doubted not that his wife would rejoice as he did.

Presently the cart destined to bring Phoebe’s boxes started for Chagford under Ted Chown’s direction.  It was a new cart, and the owner hoped that sight of it, with “William Blanchard, Newtake,” nobly displayed on the tail-board, would please his father-in-law.

Meantime, at Monks Barton the great day had likewise dawned, but Phoebe, from cowardice rather than philosophy, did not mention what was to happen until the appearance of Chown made it necessary to do so.

Mr. Blee was the first to stand bewildered before Ted’s blunt announcement that he had come for Mrs. Blanchard’s luggage.

“What luggage?  What the douce be talkin’ ’bout?” he asked.

“Why, everything, I s’pose.  She ‘m comin’ home to-day—­that’s knawn, ban’t it?”

“Gormed if ’tis!  Not by me, anyways—­nor Miller, neither.”

Then Phoebe appeared and Billy heard the truth.

“My!  An’ to keep it that quiet!  Theer’ll be a tidy upstore when Miller comes to hear tell—­”

But Mr. Lyddon was at the door and Phoebe answered his questioning eyes.

“My birthday, dear faither.  You must remember—­why, you was the first to give me joy of it!  Twenty-one to-day, an’ I must go—­I must—­’tis my duty afore everything.”

The old man’s jaw fell and he looked the picture of sorrowful surprise.

“But—­but to spring it like this!  Why to-day?  Why to-day?  It’s madness and it’s cruelty to fly from your home the first living moment you’ve got the power.  I’d counted on a merry evenin,’ tu, an’ axed more ’n wan to drink your gude health.”

“Many’s the merry evenings us’ll have, dear faither, please God; but a husband’s a husband.  He’ve been that wonnerful patient, tu, for such as him.  ‘T was my fault for not remindin’ you.  An’ yet I did, now an’ again, but you wouldn’t see it.  Yet you knawed in your heart, an’ I didn’t like to pain ‘e dwellin’ on it overmuch.”

“How did I knaw?  I didn’t knaw nothin’ ’t all ’bout it.  How should I?  Me grawin’ aulder an’ aulder, an’ leanin’ more an’ more ’pon ’e at every turn.  An’ him no friend to me—­he ’s never sought to win me—­he ’s—­”