For another ten minutes Mr. Lyddon chattered, but at the end of that time Martin escaped and proceeded homewards.  His head throbbed and his mind was much excited by the intelligence of the day.  The yellow stubbles, the green meadows, the ploughed lands similarly spun before him and whirled up to meet the sky.  As he re-entered the village a butcher’s cart nearly knocked him down.  Hope rose in a glorious new sunrise—­the hope that he had believed was set for ever.  Then, passing that former home of Clement Hicks and his mother, did Grimbal feel great fear and misgiving.  The recollection of Chris and her love for the dead man chilled him.  He remembered his own love for Chris when he thought she must be dead.  He told himself that he must hope nothing; he repeated to himself how fulfilment of his desire, now revived after long sleep, might still be as remote as when Chris Blanchard said him nay in the spring wastes under Newtake five years and more ago.  His head dinned this upon his heart; but his heart would not believe and responded with a sanguine song of great promise.

CHAPTER III

ANSWERED

At a spot in the woods some distance below Newtake, Martin Grimbal sat and waited, knowing she whom he sought must pass that way.  He had called at the farm and been welcomed by Phoebe.  Will was on the peat beds, and, asking after Chris, he learnt that she had gone into the valley to pick blackberries and dewberries, where they already began to ripen in the coombs.

Under aisles of woodland shadows he sat, where the river murmured down mossy stairs of granite in a deep dingle.  Above him, the varying foliage of oak and ash and silver birch was already touched with autumn, and trembled into golden points where bosses of pristine granite, crowned with the rowan’s scarlet harvest, arose above their luxuriance.  The mellow splendour of these forests extended to the river’s brink, along which towered noble masses of giant osmunda, capped by seed spears of tawny red.  Here and there gilded lances splashed into the stream or dotted its still pools with scattered sequins of sunshine, where light winnowed through the dome of the leaves; and at one spot, on a wrinkled root that wound crookedly from the alder into the river, there glimmered a halcyon, like an opal on a miser’s bony finger.  From above the tree-tops there sounded cynic bird-laughter, and gazing upwards Martin saw a magpie flaunt his black and white plumage across the valley; while at hand the more musical merriment of a woodpecker answered him.

Then a little child’s laugh came to his ear, rippling along with the note of the babbling water, and one moment later a small, sturdy boy appeared.  A woman accompanied him.  She had slipped a foot into the river, and thus awakened the amusement of her companion.

Chris steadied herself after the mishap, balanced her basket more carefully, then stooped down to pick some of the berries that had scattered from it on the bank.  When she rose a man with a brown face and soft grey eyes gleaming through gold-rimmed spectacles appeared immediately before.