“I doubted I knawed him through an’ through at last, but ’t is awnly to-day, an’ after this, that I can say as I do,” mused Mr. Lyddon over an untasted breakfast.  “To think he runned them awful risks to make you fast to him!  To think he corned all across England in the past to make you his wife against the danger on wan side, an’ the power o’ Jan Grimbal an’ me drawed up ’pon the other!”

Pursuing this strain to Phoebe’s heartfelt relief, the miller neither assumed an attitude of great indignation at Will’s action nor affected despair of his future.  He was much bewildered, however.

“He’ll keep me ’mazed so long as I live, ’pears to me.  But he ’m gone for the present, an’ I doan’t say I’m sorry, knawin’ what was behind.  No call for you to sob yourself into a fever.  Please God, he’ll be back long ‘fore you want him.  Us’ll make the least we can of it, an’ bide patient until we hear tell of him.  He’ve gone to Plymouth—­that’s all Chagford needs to knaw at present.”

“Theer ‘s newspapers an’ Jan Grimbal,” sobbed Phoebe.

“A dark man wi’ fixed purposes, sure enough,” admitted her father, for Will’s long letter had placed all the facts before him.  “What he’ll do us caan’t say, though, seein’ Will’s act, theer ‘s nothin’ more left for un.  Why has the man been silent so long if he meant to strike in the end?  Now I must go an’ tell Mrs. Blanchard.  Will begs an’ prays of me to do that so soon as he shall be gone; an’ he ’m right.  She ought to knaw; but ‘t is a job calling for careful choice of words an’ a light hand.  Wonder is to me he didn’t tell her hisself.  But he never does what you’d count ’pon his doing.”

“You won’t tell Billy, faither, will ’e?  Ban’t no call for that.”

“I won’t tell him, certainly not; but Blee ’s a ferret when a thing ’s hid.  A detective mind theer is to Billy.  How would it do to tell un right away an’ put un ’pon his honour to say nothing?”

“He mustn’t knaw; he mustn’t knaw.  He couldn’t keep a secret like that if you gived un fifty pounds to keep it.  So soon tell a town-crier as him.”

“Then us won’t,” promised Mr. Lyddon, and ten minutes after he proceeded to Mrs. Blanchard’s cottage with the news.  His first hasty survey of the position had not been wholly unfavourable to Will, but he was a man of unstable mind in his estimates of human character, and now he chiefly occupied his thoughts with the offence of desertion from the army.  The disgrace of such an action magnified itself as he reflected upon Will’s unhappy deed.

Phoebe, meantime, succumbed and found herself a helpless prey of terrors vague and innumerable.  Will’s fate she could not guess at; but she felt it must be severe; she doubted not that his sentence would extend over long years.  In her dejection and misery she mourned for herself and wondered what manner of babe would this be that now took substance through a season of such gloom and accumulated sorrows.