“Vang into un, man, an’ knock his ugly head off!” said Will encouragingly, and the babe to whom he spoke made renewed efforts as both combatants tumbled into the road, the devil in their little bright eyes, each puny muscle straining.  Tim had his foe by the hair, and the elder was trying to bite his enemy’s leg, when Martin Grimbal and Chris Blanchard approached from Rushford Bridge.  They had met by chance, and Chris was coming to the farm while the antiquary had business elsewhere.  Now a scuffle in a cloud of dust arrested them and the woman, uninfluenced by considerations of sportsmanship, pounced upon Timothy, dragged him from his operations, and, turning to Will, spoke as Martin Grimbal had never heard her speak before.

“You, a grawed man, to stand theer an’ see that gert wild beast of a bwoy tear this li’l wan like a savage tiger!  Look at his sclowed faace all streaming wi’ blood!  ‘S truth!  I’d like to sarve you the same, an’ I would for two pins!  I’m ashamed of ’e!”

“He hit wi’ his fistes like a gude un,” said Will, grinning; “an’ he’m made o’ the right stuff, I’ll swear.  Couldn’t have done better if he was my awn son.  I be gwaine to give un a braave toy bimebye.  You see t’other kid’s faace come to-morrow!”

Martin Grimbal watched Chris fondle the gasping Timothy, clean his wounds, calm his panting heart; then, as though a superhuman voice whispered in his ear, her secret stood solved, and the truth of Timothy’s parentage confronted him in a lightning flash of the soul.  He looked at Chris as a man might gaze upon a spectre; he stared at her and through her into her past; he pieced each part of the puzzle to its kindred parts until all stood complete; he read “mother” in her voice, in her caressing hands and gleaming eyes as surely as man reads morning in the first light of dawn; and he marvelled that a thing so clear and naked had been left to his discovery.  The revelation shook him not a little, for he was familiar with the rumours concerning Tim’s paternity, and had been disposed to believe them; but from the moment of the new thought’s inception it gripped him, for he felt that the thing was true.  As lamps, so ordered that the light of each may fall on the fringe of darkness where its fellow fades, and thus complete a chain of illumination, so the present discovery, duly considered, was but one point of truth revealing others.  It made clear much that had not been easy to understand, and the tremendous fact rose in his mind as a link in such a perfect sequence of evidence that doubt actually vanished before he had lost sight of Chris and passed dumfounded upon his way.  Her lover’s sudden death, her own disappearance, the child’s advent at Newtake, and the woman’s subsequent return—­these main incidents connected a thousand others and explained what little mystery still obscured the position.  He pursued his road and marvelled as he went how a tragedy so thinly veiled had thus escaped every eye.  Within the story that Chris had told, this other story might be intercalated without convicting her of any spoken falsehood.  Now he guessed at the reason why Timothy’s mother had refused to marry him on his last proposal; then, thinking of the child, he knew Tim’s father.