He broke off and his face was very dark.

“What, Will?  If what?  Oh, comfort me, comfort me, Will, for God’s sake!  An’ another li’l wan comin’!”

“Doan’t take on,” he said.  “Ban’t my way to squeal till I’m hurt.  Let it bide, an’ be bright an’ cheery come eating, for mother ’s down in the mouth at losin’ Chris, though she doan’t shaw it.”

Mrs. Blanchard, with little Timothy, joined the breakfast party at Monks Barton, and a certain gloom hanging over the party, Mr. Blee commented upon it in his usual critical spirit.

“This here givin’ in marriage do allus make a looker-on down in the mouth if he ‘s a sober-minded sort o’ man.  ’T is the contrast between the courageousness of the two poor sawls jumpin’ into the state, an’ the solid fact of bein’ a man’s wife or a woman’s husband for all time.  The vows they swear!  An’ that Martin’s voice so strong an’ cheerful!  A teeming cause o’ broken oaths the marriage sarvice; yet each new pair comes along like sheep to the slaughter.”

“You talk like a bachelor man,” said Damaris.

“Not so, Mrs. Blanchard, I assure ’e!  Lookers-on see most of the game.  Ban’t the mite as lives in a cheese what can tell e’ ’bout the flavour of un.  Look at a married man at a weddin’—­all broadcloth an’ cheerfulness, like the fox as have lost his tail an’ girns to see another chap in the same pickle.”

“Yet you tried blamed hard to lose your tail an’ get a wife, for all your talk,” said Will, who, although his mind was full enough, yet could generally find a sharp word for Mr. Blee.

“Bah to you!” answered the old man angrily. “That for you!  ’T is allus your way to bring personal talk into high conversation.  I was improvin’ the hour with general thoughts; but the vulgar tone you give to a discourse would muzzle the wisdom o’ Solomon.”

Miller Lyddon here made an effort to re-establish peace and soon afterwards the meal came to an end.

Half an hour later Phoebe heard from her husband the story of his brief military career:  of how he had enlisted as a preliminary to going abroad and making his fortune, how he had become servant to one Captain Tremayne, how upon the news of Phoebe’s engagement he had deserted, and how his intention to return and make a clean breast of it had been twice changed by the circumstances that followed his marriage.  Long he took in detailing every incident and circumstance.

“Coming to think,” he said, “of coourse ’t is clear as Grimbal must knaw my auld master.  I seed his name raised to a Major in the Western Morning News a few year agone, an’ he was to Okehampton with a battalion when Hicks come by his death.  So that’s how’t is; an’ I ban’t gwaine to bide Grimbal’s time to be ruined, you may be very sure of that.  Now I knaw, I act.”

“He may be quite content you should knaw.  That’s meat an’ drink enough for him, to think of you gwaine in fear day an’ night.”