Then they came to the elder’s house, and there was the girl at the gate waiting for ’em as before.

“When she went in and banged the door, you thought she’d gone to weep,” said Chawner; “but for two pins, Samuel, I’d have told you she was dancing a fandango on the kitchen floor.  ’Tis a very fine thing for a woman to know her faith is so truly founded, and she’s got the faith in you would move mountains; and so have I; and you can wed when you’ve a mind to it.”

So Chawner left ’em in each other’s arms for five minutes, and then Samuel went on his way.

A very happy marriage, and a week after they joined up, Chawner married a new-made widow, which he had long ordained to do in secret; but she wouldn’t take him till a year and a day was passed.

And Samuel would often tell about his wife’s faith in after-time and doubt if the young men he saw growing up around him would have rose to such fine heights as what he done.

But then Cicely would laugh at him and tell him that his own son was just so steadfast as ever he was, and plenty other women’s sons also.

No.  VIII

THE HOUND’S POOL

By day the place was inviting enough and a child wouldn’t have feared to be there.  Dean Burn came down from its cradle far away in the hills and threaded Dean Woods with ripple and flash and song.  The beck lifted its voice in stickles and shouted over the mossy apron of many a little waterfall; and then under the dark of the woods it would go calm, nestle in a backwater here and there, then run on again.  And of all fine spots on a sunny day the Hound’s Pool was finest, for here Dean Burn had scooped a hole among the roots of forest trees and lay snug from the scythe of the east wind, so that the first white violet was always to be found upon the bank and the earliest primrose also.  In winter time, when the boughs above were naked, the sun would glint upon the water; and sometimes all would be so still that you could hear a vole swimming; and then again, after a Dartmoor freshet, the stream would come down in spate, cherry-red, and roll big waters for such a little river.  And then Hound’s Pool would be like to rise over its banks and drown the woodman’s path that ran beside it and throw up sedges and dead grasses upon the lowermost boughs of the overhanging thicket to show where it could reach sometimes.

’Twas haunted, and old folk—­John Meadows among ’em—­stoutly maintained that nothing short of Doomsday would lay the spectrum, because they knew the ancient tale of Weaver Knowles, and believed in it also; but the legend had gone out of fashion, as old stories will, and it came as a new and strange thing to the rising generation.  ’Tis any odds the young men and maidens would never have believed in it; but by chance it happed to be a young man who revived the story, and as he’d seen with his own eyes, he couldn’t doubt.  William Parsloe he was, under-keeper at Dean, and he told what he’d seen to John Meadows, the head-keeper; but it weren’t till he heard old John on the subject that he knew as he’d beheld something out of another world than his own.