“Much what your son said in sharper words.  Well, you’m out o’ reckoning for once, wise though you be most times; for if a maiden’s happiness doan’t rest with her faither, blamed if I see wheer it should.  And to think such a man as me doan’t knaw wiser ’n two childern who caan’t number forty year between ’em is flat fulishness, surely?”

“I knaw Will,” said Mrs. Blanchard, slowly and emphatically; “I knaw un to the core, and that’s to say more than you or anybody else can.  A mother may read her son like print, but no faither can see to the bottom of a wife-old daughter—­not if he was Solomon’s self.  So us’ll wait an’ watch wi’out being worse friends.”

She went home again the happier for her conversation; but any thought that Mr. Lyddon might have been disposed to devote to her prophecy was for the time banished by the advent of John Grimbal and his brother.

Like boys home from school, they dwelt in the present delight of their return, and postponed the varied duties awaiting them, to revel again in the old sights, sounds, and scents.  To-day they were about an angling excursion, and the fishers’ road to Fingle lying through Monks Barton, both brothers stopped a while and waited upon their old friend of the mill, according to John’s promise of the previous afternoon.  Martin carried the creel and the ample luncheon it contained; John smoked a strong cigar and was only encumbered with his light fly-rod; the younger designed to accompany his brother through Fingle Valley; then leave him there, about his sport, and proceed alone to various places of natural and antiquarian interest.  But John meant fishing and nothing else.  To him great woods were no more than cover for fur and feathers; rivers and streams meant a vehicle for the display of a fly to trout, and only attracted him or the reverse, according to the fish they harboured.  When the moorland waters spouted and churned, cherry red from their springs in the peat, he deemed them a noble spectacle; when, as at present, Teign herself had shrunk to a mere silver thread, and the fingerling trout splashed and wriggled half out of water in the shallows, he freely criticised its scanty volume and meagre depths.

Miller Lyddon welcomed the men very heartily.  He had been amongst those who dismissed them with hope to their battle against the world, and now he reminded them of his sanguine predictions.  Will Blanchard’s disappearance amused John Grimbal and he laughed when Billy Blee appeared red-hot with the news.  Mr. Lyddon made no secret of his personal opinion of Blanchard, and all debated the probable design of the wanderer.

“Maybe he’s ‘listed,” said John, “an’ a good thing too if he has.  It makes a man of a young fellow.  I’m for conscription myself—­always have been.”

“I be minded to think he’ve joined the riders,” declared Billy.  “Theer comed a circus here last month, with braave doin’s in the way of horsemanship and Merry Andrews, and such like devilries.  Us all goes to see it from miles round every year; an’ Will was theer.  Circus folk do see the world in a way denied to most, and theer manner of life takes ’em even as far as Russia and the Indies I’ve heard.”