“Take your money again, bwoy.  No Hicks ever wanted charity yet, least of all from a Blanchard.  Pick it up; and it’s lucky Clement ban’t home, for he’d have said some harsh words, I’m thinking.  Keep it ’gainst the rainy days up to Newtake.  And it may surprise ’e to knaw that my son’s worth be getting found out at last.  It won’t be so long ’fore he takes awver Squire Grimbal’s farm to the Red House.  What do ‘e think o’ that?  He’ve gone to see un this very day ’bout it.”

“Well, well!  This be news, and no mistake—­gude news, tu, I s’pose.  Jan Grimbal!  An’ what Clem doan’t knaw ‘bout farmin’, I’ll be mighty pleased to teach un, I’m sure.”

“No call to worry yourself; Clem doan’t want no other right arm than his awn.”

“Chris shall have the money, then; an’ gude luck to ’em both, say I.”

He departed, with great astonishment the main emotion of his mind.  Nothing could well have happened to surprise him more, and now he felt that he should rejoice, but found it difficult to do so.

“Braave news, no doubt,” he reflected, “an’ yet, come to think on it, I’d so soon the devil had given him a job as Grimbal.  Besides, to choose him!  What do Clement knaw ‘bout farmin’?  Just so much as I knaw ’bout verse-writin’, an’ no more.”

CHAPTER XV

“THE ANGEL OF THE DARKER DRINK”

Patches of mist all full of silver light moved like lonely living things on the face of the high Moor.  Here they dispersed and scattered, here they approached and mingled together, here they stretched forth pearly fingers above the shining granite, and changed their shapes at the whim of every passing breeze; but the tendency of each shining, protean mass was to rise to the sun, and presently each valley and coomb lay clear, while the cool vapours wound in luminous and downy undulations along the highest points of the land before vanishing into air.

A solitary figure passed over the great waste.  He took his way northward and moved across Scorhill, leaving Wattern Tor to the left.  Beneath its ragged ridges, in a vast granite amphitheatre, twinkled the cool birth-springs of the little Wallabrook, and the water here looked leaden under shade, here sparkled with silver at the margin of a cloud shadow, here shone golden bright amid the dancing heads of the cotton-grass under unclouded sunlight.  The mist wreaths had wholly departed before noon, and only a few vast mountains of summer gold moved lazily along the upper chambers of the air.  A huge and solitary shadow overtook the man and spread itself directly about him, then swept onwards; infinite silence encompassed him; once from a distant hillside a voice cried to him, where women and children moved like drab specks and gathered the ripe whortleberries that now wove purple patterns into the fabric of the Moor; but he heeded not the cry; and other sound there was none save the occasional