Suicide was always a familiar thought with this man, but it had never been farther from his mind than of late.  Cowardly in himself, his love for Chris Blanchard was too great to suffer even the shadow of self-slaughter to tempt him at the present moment.  What might happen in the future, he could not tell; but while her happiness was threatened and her life’s welfare hung in the balance, his place was by her side.  Then he looked into Will Blanchard’s future and asked himself what was the worst that could result from his pending treachery.  He did not know and wished time had permitted him to make inquiries.  But his soul was too weary to care.  He only looked for the ordeal to be ended; his aching eyes, now bent on his temporal environment, ranged widely for the spectacle of a rider on a brown horse.

A red flag flapped from a lofty pole at the foot of Steeperton, but Hicks, to whom the object and its significance were familiar, paid no heed and passed on towards Oke Tor.  On one side the mass rose gradually up by steps and turrets; on the other, the granite beetled into a low cliff springing abruptly from the turf.  Within its clefts and crannies there grew ferns, and to the north-east, sheltered under ledges from the hot sun, cattle and ponies usually stood or reclined upon such a summer day as this, and waited for the oncoming cool of evening before returning to pasture.  On the present occasion, however, no stamp of hoof, snort of nostril, whisk of tail, and hum of flies denoted the presence of beasts.  For some reason they had been driven elsewhere.  Clement climbed the Tor, then stood upon its highest point, and turning his back to the sun, scanned the wide rolling distances over which he had tramped, and sought fruitlessly for an approaching horseman.  But no particular hour had been specified, and he knew not and cared not how long he might have to wait.

In a direction quite contrary to that on which the eyes of Hicks were set, sat John Grimbal upon his horse and talked with another man.  They occupied a position at the lower-most end of Taw Marsh, beneath the Belstones; and they watched some seventy artillerymen busily preparing for certain operations of a nature to specially interest the master of the Red House.  Indeed the pending proceedings had usually occupied his mind, to total exclusion of all other affairs; but to-day even more momentous events awaited him in the immediate future, and he looked from his companion along the great valley to where Oke Tor appeared, shrunk to a mere grey stone at the farther end.  Of John Grimbal’s life, it may now be said that it drifted into a confirmed and bitter misogyny.  He saw no women, spoke of the sex with disrespect, and chose his few friends among men whose sporting and warlike instincts chimed with his own.  Sport he pursued with dogged pertinacity, but the greater part of his leisure was devoted to the formation of a yeomanry corps at Chagford, and in this design he had made