When Mr. Mordecai Cockey entered Fox Tor Farm the spirit of Grace Malherb sank within her. Had an executioneer appeared, she had felt no greater horror; for Mr. Cockey was a journeyman tailor, and, according to the custom of that time upon Dartmoor, when clothes were needed, the maker of them came to his customers and took up his abode in farm or hamlet until local requirement was satisfied. A month\'s work or more awaited Mr. Cockey, and first among the articles to be fashioned with his skilful needle were certain gowns—a part of Grace\'s wedding trousseau; for all men now knew that within the space of a few weeks Miss Malherb was to become Mrs. Peter Norcot.

Two trestles and a dozen boards completed Mr. Cockey\'s professional requirements in the servants\' hall; and here, day by day, he sat and snipped and sewed, and sewed and snipped. He was a very full-bodied, pallid man, with flabby cheeks, mournful, watery eyes and a puzzled expression. He came from Totnes, and often mourned that his itinerant labours required him to be much away from his wife and family. This tailor descended in direct line from Mordecai Cockey, the famous seventeenth-century bell-founder; and when he heard any one of those seven great bells that the bygone Cockey had cast, he would lift his head where the musical monster thundered from some Devon belfry, and nod respectfully, as to the spirit of his ancestor.

Now Mordecai worked at the wardrobe of the farm, and, elevated upon his trestles, held a sort of conference, and told the things life taught him. Once during the dinner hour, several farm folk were at Mr. Cockey\'s feet, as he sat cross-legged amid his tools and ate his meal of bread and cheese. Meat he might have had in plenty, but he explained to Dinah Beer that his sedentary life had long since turned him vegetarian.

"By God\'s blessing I can stomach cheese," he said, "an\' if so be as a body\'s humours will cope with vinnied cheese, he may hope for a long life."

"Be my breeches mended, Mister?" asked Tom Putt. "\'Cause if so, I should like to don \'em afore afternoon. I\'ve got a riding job as\'ll take me to Holne by-an\'-by."

"They\'m done. I\'ve double-seated \'em for \'e."

Mr. Cockey nodded towards the garment.

"You\'m always as good as your word, I\'m sure," said Harvey Woodman, "though how them fat hands of yours—as look more like bunches of parsnips than hands—can do such finnicky work makes me wonder."

"Ah, I dare say a lot of things make you wonder," answered the tailor. "Not but what I envy you your way of life, for \'tis healthier\'n mine. You chaps, as till the earth, have no time to fret your intellects like what I do. Ploughmen never band together and make trouble in the world. Tailors be a very thinking race; but you\'ll not find they takes a hopeful view of human nature."

"Then they\'m small-minded," said Beer firmly; "for, looked at all round, human nature be a very hopeful thing."

Mordecai Cockey sighed.

"You may be in the right. Perhaps building of clothes do narrow the heart, for we grow apt to think \'tis our feathers make the birds. For that matter the world counts us but light. We\'m slighted tradesmen, we tailors. They say it takes nine of us to make a man; though it only takes one to get a long family, as I know to my cost. Thirteen children have I, an\' all with the tailoring spirit in \'em except my eldest son."

"An\' what might he be doing?" asked Putt.

"Well, he\'s a baker."

"A very honest trade."

"That\'s just what it ban\'t," declared Mr. Cockey. "They\'m sly as lawyers; an\' there\'s a damned sight more in bread than corn nowadays. A man may be eating his own great gran\'faither; as I\'ve said openly down to Totnes, an\' nobody contradicted me.

"God\'s word! They don\'t rob churchyards for their bones, do they?" asked Woodman. "If I thought that, I\'d never take bit nor sup to Totnes no more."

"There\'s ways an\' ways," explained the tailor. "Bone goes in; as thus. Man is earth, an\' earth is bread; an\' when they take the top spit off what was thought to be an old burial place of the ancients an\' turn it over an\' make a wheat field—what then?"

"\'Tis just short of a cannibal act!" declared Woodman; for they never buried deep in them days."

"Rubbish, Harvey!" answered Beer. "We ourselves be only the fatness of the earth when all\'s said. \'Tis nature\'s plan; an\' I see no harm in it at all."

"More don\'t I for that matter," declared Cockey. "With my well-knowed feelings about human nature, you won\'t be surprised if I say that many a man\'s better as corn or cabbage than ever he was on two legs."

"Then you don\'t believe in God, same as me," said Kekewich grimly.

"Not at all, not at all," answered the other. "I\'m only saying a man\'s body is mud, an\' his clothes is mud in shape of wool or flax; an\' he\'s all mud to the eye; but as to his soaring spirit I won\'t hazard a word. A tailor must believe in God. \'Twas Him as gave the word for clothes an\' put Adam an\' his lady into their first shifts of His own Almighty making."

"You meet men whose spirits be the muddiest part about \'em, all the same," declared Kekewich.

"So you will; but every thinking creature turned of fifty must have come across folks with souls looking out of their eyes. Why, I\'ve seed pictures in big houses where the paint had a soul! Ess fay—beautiful dead an\' gone women have pretty nigh spoke to me where I sat an\' worked below their gold frames."

"I\'ll never believe in souls," said the older man. "We\'m a vile race, an\' no God of Heaven would ever make such a poor bargain as to overbuy such trash as us at the price of His only Son. Why for should He? If He\'d but lifted His finger, He might have had us for nought."

"The devil must be itching for you, Kek," said Harvey Woodman.

"You\'m no hand at argument, Mr. Kekewich," continued Cockey; "for half the beauty of argufying is to hold close to the matter. You was saying as you didn\'t believe in souls; an\' I was saying as I did. Well, take an instance. There\'s Miss Grace Malherb for who I be making this here lovely vest. Be that bowerly maiden no more than the pink-an\'-white china dust she goes in? If so, she\'s no better\'n this bit of flowered silk."

"People can be good or evil, an\' yet have no more souls than dogs," began the head man; but at that moment Miss Malherb herself entered as a bell rang to tell that the dinner hour was done.

The labourers departed to their work, and Grace was left with Mr. Cockey. She came to beg a secret favour and now whispered it into the tailor\'s ear, though there was none but himself to hear it.

"If you command, it must be done," he said. "I know a mariner to the harbour at Totnes, where the Holne timber goes down Dart to build His Majesty\'s great warships. The man has goodly stores, an\' will sell me so much bunting as I want—red, white and blue. I\'m going down to-morrow for the day to get more cloth."

"And, before all things, keep it secret. Not a whisper!"

"It shall be as you please, Miss. An\' I\'ll ax you to take this here vest along, an\' put it on, an\' let me see if \'tis all right."

"You work so dreadfully quick! You\'re sewing a shroud,—d\'you know that, Mordecai?"

"What a word! How comes it you want stuff for flags then?"

"Ah! \'tis not for my wedding day. Now, if you could fashion me a pair of wings to fly with——"

Mr. Cockey drew a thread through his needle.

"Fine clothes don\'t make a happy marriage, I know," he said; "but they do put heart into a wedding party, an\' speaking generally, they\'m a great softener of life to females. A parcel from me has dried many tears—poor fools."

"I\'m not married yet, however."

"No, but—Lord! what\'s that?"

The tailor sat with his back to the window, and, unseen by him, a horseman had ridden up to it. Now he stopped, rapped upon the casement with his whip, doffed his hat and grinned at Grace. The glass was not good, and it distorted a countenance generally esteemed amiable and handsome.

"Mercy on us, what a chap! \'Tis a face like to Satan!" cried Cockey.

"That\'s the gentleman my father wishes me to marry," answered Grace quietly.

"Then I\'m sure I beg pardon, Miss. \'Twas a twist in the glass."

"You caught sight of his soul—not his face," she said. The girl had turned pale, and now she hastily left the room.


Much had happened since Mr. Norcot\'s last visit, and soon accident was to enlighten him in certain directions. Mordecai Cockey went off on the following morning and returned in eight-and-forty hours with various bales and packages. One of these he handed to Grace in private, and she conveyed the parcel unseen to her chamber. Its nature will presently appear. For the moment it suffices to say that Miss Malherb\'s secret concerned Cecil Stark, with whom, thanks to John Lee, she had now established a correspondence. Their letters Grace showed to John openly for some time, but, perceiving that they were the joy of two lives, the messenger refused to read these missives more. Grace still stood at the parting of the ways, nor knew that John Lee\'s road was already chosen. The relation of three became difficult beyond endurance;............