“I waited till I see you come to and knew you’d be all right then; but I followed you, to see what you was up to, and didn’t go home till I saw you drive away with the doctor.  My dog was my joy till that night—­a great mongrel I picked up when I was to Plymouth and kept close of a day.  Clever as Satan at finding fallen birds in the dark, though unfortunately he didn’t find ’em all.  But after the happenings I took him back to Plymouth again on the quiet, and he won’t frighten nobody no more.”

Then ’twas her turn and she dressed him down properly and gave him all the law and the prophets, and made him promise on his oath that he’d never do no more crimes, or kill fur or feather that didn’t belong by rights to him.

And he swore and kept his oath most steadfast.

“I’ve catched the finest creature as ever harboured in Dean Woods,” he said, “and her word be my law for evermore.”

But nobody else heard the truth that Wade was the unknown sinner, for Millicent felt as her father would have been cruel vexed about it.

They was wed in the summer and Wade found open-air work to his taste not a mile from their home.  But often, good lovers still, they’ll go to Hound’s Pool for memory’s sake and sit and hear Weaver Knowles working unseen about his task.

No.  IX

THE PRICE OF MILLY BASSETT

Memory, as we old folk know, be the plaything of time, and when trouble comes and we wilt and reckon life’s ended, the years roll unresting on, and the storm passes, and the dark breaks to grey again, and, may be, even the sun’s self peeps forth once more.  For our little wits ain’t built to hold grief for ever, else the world would be a lunatic asylum and not the tolerable sane and patient place we mostly find it.

It was like that with my friend, Jonas Bird.  When his wife died, and left him and three young childer, his light went out, and though no more than thirty-five years of age, he felt ’twas the end of the world.  He comforted his cruel sufferings with the thought of a wonnerful tombstone to Sarah Bird, and there’s no doubt that tombstones, though they can’t make or mar the dead, have, time and again, softened the lot of the living.  And you may say that poor Sarah’s mark in the churchyard was the subject that first began to calm Jonas.  But it did a lot more than that.

He was a sandy-headed man with old-fashioned whiskers, a long face like a horse, blue eyes and a wondering expression.  In fact, life did astonish him a good bit, and being a simple soul, most things that happened were apt to puzzle him.  A carpenter by trade, he did very well in that walk of life and had saved money.  But he had long lived for one thing only, and that was Sarah, and when she dropped sudden and left him with two little boys and a girl babe, he was more puzzled than ever and went in a proper miz-maze of perplexity that such things could be.