Steadily the promises of the sky multiplied and Phoebe’s impatience increased.  Her position did not, however, depend for comfort upon the return of sunshine, for she stood out of the weather, where sundry giant rocks to the number of five arose in a fantastic pile.  Nature’s primal architects were responsible for the Pixies’ Parlour, and upon the awful morning of Dartmoor’s creation these enormous masses had first been hurled to their present position—­outposts of the eternal granite, though themselves widely removed from the central waste of the Moor.  This particular and gigantic monument of the past stands with its feet in land long cultivated.  Plough and harrow yearly skirt the Pixies’ Parlour; it rises to-day above yellow corn, to-morrow amid ripening roots; it crowns the succeeding generations of man’s industry, and watches a ceaseless cycle of human toil.  The rocks of which it is composed form a sort of rude chamber, sacred to fairy folk since a time before the memory of the living; briars and ivy-tods conceal a part of the fabric; a blackthorn, brushed at this season with purple fruit, rises above it; one shadowed ledge reveals the nightly roosting place of hawk or raven; and marks of steel on the stone show clearly where some great or small fragment of granite has been blasted from the parent pile for the need of man.  Multi-coloured, massive, and picturesque, the Parlour, upon Phoebe Lyddon’s visit to it, stood forth against the red bosom of naked land; for a fierce summer had early ripened the vanished harvest, and now its place was already ploughed again, while ashes of dead fire scattered upon the earth showed where weed and waste had been consumed after ingathering of the grain.

Patches of August blue now lightened the aerial grey; then sunshine set a million gems twinkling on the great bejewelled bosom of the valley.  Under this magic heat an almost instantaneous shadowy ghost of fresh vapour rose upon the riparian meadows, and out of it, swinging along with the energy of youth and high spirits, came a lad.  Phoebe smiled and twinkled a white handkerchief to him, and he waved his hat and bettered his pace for answer.

Soon Will Blanchard reached his sweetheart, and showed himself a brown, straight youngster, with curly hair, pugnacious nose, good shoulders, and a figure so well put together that his height was not apparent until he stood alongside another man.  Will’s eyes were grey as Phoebe’s, but of a different expression; soft and unsettled, cloudy as the recent weather, full of the alternate mist and flash of a precious stone, one moment all a-dreaming, the next aglow.  His natural look was at first sight a little stern until a man came to know it, then this impression waned and left a critic puzzled.  The square cut of his face and abrupt angle of his jaw did not indeed belie Will Blanchard, but the man’s smile magically dissipated this austerity of aspect, and no sudden sunshine ever brightened a dark day quicker than pleasure