“Not it,” declared Billy; “he thought he’d killed un; cracked the neck of un.”

“The blow ’pon his faace scatted abroad his left nostril; the fall brawked his arm, not his neck; an’ the spurs t’ other was wearin’ tored his leg to the bone.  Doctor’s seen un; so tell Grimbal.  Theer’s pleasure in such payment.”

She spoke without emotion, and showed no passion against the master of the Red House.  When Will had come to her, being once satisfied in her immediate motherly agony that his life was not endangered, she allowed her mind a sort of secret, fierce delight at his performance and its success in the main issue.  She was proud of him at the bottom of her heart; but before other eyes bore herself with outward imperturbability.

“You’ll keep the gal, I reckon?” she said quietly; “if you can hold hand off Will till he’m on his legs again, I’d thank you.”

“I shall do what I please, when I please; an’ my poor fule of a daughter stops with me as long as I’ve got power to make her.”

“Hope you’ll live to see things might have been worse.”

“That’s impossible.  No worse evil could have fallen upon me.  My grey hairs a laughing-stock, and your awn brother’s hand in it.  He knawed well enough the crime he was committing.”

“You’ve a short memory, Miller.  I lay Jan Grimbal knaws the reason if you doan’t.  The worm that can sting does, if you tread on it.  Gude-night to ’e.”

“An’ how do you find yourself now?” Billy inquired, as his master and he returned to Monks Barton.

“Weary an’ sick, an’ filled with gall.  Was it wrong to make the match, do ‘e think, seein’ ’t was all for love of my cheel?  Was I out to push so strong for it?  I seem I done right, despite this awful mischance.”

“An’ so you did; an’ my feelin’s be the same as yours to a split hair, though I’ve got no language for em at this unnatural hour of marnin’,” said Billy.

Then in silence, to the bobbing illumination of their lanterns, Mr. Lyddon and his familiar dragged their weary bodies home.

CHAPTER XI

LOVE AND GREY GRANITE

The lofty central area of Devon has ever presented a subject of fascination to geologists; and those evidences of early man which adorn Dartmoor to-day have similarly attracted antiquarian minds for many generations past.  But the first-named student, although his researches plunge him into periods of mundane time inconceivably more remote than that with which the archaeologist is concerned, yet reaches conclusions more definite and arrives at a nearer approximation to truth than any who occupy themselves in the same area with manifold and mysterious indications of early humanity’s sojourn.  The granite upheaval during that awful revolt of matter represented by the creation of Dartmoor has been assigned to a period between the Carboniferous and Permian eras; but whether