Detail vanished from the Moor; dim and dimensionless it spread to the transparent splendour of the horizon, and its eternal attributes of great vastness, great loneliness, great silence reigned together unfretted by particulars.  Gathering gloom diminished the wide glory of the sky, and slowly robbed the pageant of its colour.  Then rose each hill and undulation in a different shade of night, and every altitude mingled into the outlines of its neighbour.  Nocturnal mists, taking grey substance against the darkness of the lower lands, wound along the rivers, and defined the depths and ridges of the valleys.  Moving waters, laden with a last waning gleam, glided from beneath these vapoury exhalations, and even trifling rivulets, now invisible save for chance splashes of light, lacked not mystery as they moved from darkness into darkness with a song.  Stars twinkled above the dewy sleep of the earth, and there brooded over all things a prodigious peace, broken only by batrachian croakings from afar.

These phenomena Will Blanchard observed; then yellow candle fires twinkled from the dark mass of the farmhouse, and he descended in splendid weariness and strode to supper and to bed.

Yet not much sleep awaited the farmer, for soon after midnight a gentle patter of small stones at his window awakened him.  Leaping from his bed and looking into the darkness he saw a vague figure that raised its hand and beckoned without words.  Fear for the hay was Will’s first emotion, but no indication of trouble appeared.  Once he spoke, and as he did so the figure beckoned again, then approached the door.  Blanchard went down to find a woman waiting for him, and her first whispered word made him start violently and drop the candle and matches that he carried.  His ears were opened and he knew Chris without seeing her face.

“I be come back—­back home-along, brother Will,” she said, very quietly.  “I looked for mother to home, but found she weern’t theer.  An’ I be sorry to the heart for all the sorrow I’ve brought ’e both.  But it had to be.  Strange thoughts an’ voices was in me when Clem went, an’ I had to hide myself or drown myself—­so I went.”

“God’s gudeness!  Lucky I be made o’ strong stuff, else I might have thought ‘e a ghost an’ no less.  Come in out the night, an’ I’ll light a candle.  But speak soft.  Us must break this very gentle to mother.”

“Say you’ll forgive me, will ’e?  Can ’e do it?  If you knawed half you’d say ‘yes.’  I’m grawed a auld, cold-hearted woman, wi’ a grey hair here an’ theer a’ready.”

“So’ve I got wan an’ another, tu, along o’ worse sorrow than yours.  Leastways as bad as yourn.  Forgive ‘e?  A thousand times, an’ thank Heaven you’m livin’!  Wheer ever have ‘e bided?  An’ me an’ Grimbal searched the South Hams, an’ North, tu, inside out for ‘e, an’ he put notices in the papers—­dozens of ’em.”

“Along with the gypsy folk for more ’n three year now.  ‘Twas the movin’ an’ rovin’, and the opening my eyes on new things that saved me from gwaine daft.  Sometimes us coined through Chagford, an’ then I’d shut my eyes tight an’ lie in the van, so’s not to see the things his eyes had seen—­so’s not to knaw when us passed the cottage he lived in.  But now I’ve got to feel I could come back again.”