“A Knight of Forlorn Hopes,” mused the man.  “So it is, so it is.  The grasshopper, rattling his little kettledrum there, knows nearly as much of this hoary secret as I do; and the bird, that prunes his wing on the porphyry, and is gone again.  Not till some Damnonian spirit rises from the barrow, not till some chieftain of these vanished hosts shall take shape out of the mists and speak, may we glean a grain of this buried knowledge.  And who to-day would believe ten thousand Damnonian ghosts, if they stirred here once again and thronged the Moor and the moss and the ruined stone villages with their moonbeam shapes?

“Gone for ever; and she—­my Chris—­my dear—­is she to dwell in the darkness for all time, too?  O God, I would rather hear one whisper of her voice, feel one touch of her brown hand, than learn the primal truth of every dumb stone wonder in the world!”

CHAPTER III

CONCERNING THE GATE-POST

So that good store of roots and hay continue for the cattle during those months of early spring while yet the Moor is barren; so that the potato-patch prospers and the oats ripen well; so that neither pony nor bullock is lost in the shaking bogs, and late summer is dry enough to allow of ample peat-storing—­when all these conditions prevail, your moorman counts his year a fat one.  The upland farmers of Devon are in great measure armed against the bolts of chance by the nature of their lives, the grey character of even their most cheerful experiences and the poverty of their highest ambitions.  Their aspirations, becoming speedily cowed by ill-requited toil and eternal hardship, quickly dwarf and shrink, until even the most sanguine seldom extend hope much beyond necessity.

Will grumbled, growled, and fought on, while Phoebe, who knew how nobly the valleys repaid husbandry, mourned in secret that his energetic labours here could but produce such meagre results.  Very gradually their environment stamped its frosty seal on man and woman; and by the time that little Will was two years old his parents viewed life, its good and its evil, much as other Moor folks contemplated it.  Phoebe’s heart was still sweet enough, but she grew more selfish for herself and her own, more self-centred in great Will and little Will.  They filled her existence to the gradual exclusion of wider sympathies.  Miller Lyddon had given his grandson a silver mug on the day he was baptised, though since that time the old man held more aloof from the life of Newtake than Phoebe understood.  Sometimes she wondered that he had never offered to assist her husband practically, but Will much resented the suggestion when Phoebe submitted it to him.  There was no need for any such thing, he declared.  As for him, transitory ambitions and hopes gleamed up in his career as formerly, though less often.  So man and wife found their larger natures somewhat crushed by the various immediate