“Coom into the muck-hole, then,” was his gracious answer; and he led me into a filthy cell, where the miners changed their jackets.

“Simon Carfax,” I began, with a manner to discourage him; “I fear you are a shallow fellow, and not worth my trouble.”

“Then don’t take it,” he replied; “I want no man’s trouble.”

“For your sake I would not,” I answered; “but for your daughter’s sake I will; the daughter whom you left to starve so pitifully in the wilderness.”

The man stared at me with his pale gray eyes, whose colour was lost from candle light; and his voice as well as his body shook, while he cried,—­

“It is a lie, man.  No daughter, and no son have I. Nor was ever child of mine left to starve in the wilderness.  You are too big for me to tackle, and that makes you a coward for saying it.”  His hands were playing with a pickaxe helve, as if he longed to have me under it.

“Perhaps I have wronged you, Simon,” I answered very softly; for the sweat upon his forehead shone in the smoky torchlight; “if I have, I crave your pardon.  But did you not bring up from Cornwall a little maid named ‘Gwenny,’ and supposed to be your daughter?”

“Ay, and she was my daughter, my last and only child of five; and for her I would give this mine, and all the gold will ever come from it.”

“You shall have her, without either mine or gold; if you only prove to me that you did not abandon her.”

“Abandon her!  I abandon Gwenny!” He cried with such a rage of scorn, that I at once believed him.  “They told me she was dead, and crushed, and buried in the drift here; and half my heart died with her.  The Almighty blast their mining-work, if the scoundrels lied to me!”

“The scoundrels must have lied to you,” I answered, with a spirit fired by his heat of fury:  “the maid is living and with us.  Come up; and you shall see her.”

“Rig the bucket,” he shouted out along the echoing gallery; and then he fell against the wall, and through the grimy sack I saw the heaving of his breast, as I have seen my opponent’s chest, in a long hard bout of wrestling.  For my part, I could do no more than hold my tongue and look at him.

Without another word we rose to the level of the moors and mires; neither would Master Carfax speak, as I led him across the barrows.  In this he was welcome to his own way, for I do love silence; so little harm can come of it.  And though Gwenny was no beauty, her father might be fond of her.

So I put him in the cow-house (not to frighten the little maid), and the folding shutters over him, such as we used at the beestings; and he listened to my voice outside, and held on, and preserved himself.  For now he would have scooped the earth, as cattle do at yearning-time, and as meekly and as patiently, to have his child restored to him.  Not to make long tale of it—­for this thing is beyond me, through want of true experience—­I went and fetched his Gwenny forth from the back kitchen, where she was fighting, as usual, with our Betty.