Richard Daccombe visited the little bridge over Cherry-brook yet again after his supper; and in a different mood, beside a different companion, he sat upon the granite parapet.  Darkness, fretted with white moonlight, was under the fir trees; the Moor stretched dimly to the hills in one wan featureless waste; an owl cried from the wood, and one shattered chimney towered ghostly grey over the desolation.  Quaint black ruins, like hump-backed giants, dotted the immediate distance, and the river twinkled and murmured under the moon, while Dick’s pipe glowed, and a girl’s voice sounded at his elbow.

“Sweetheart,” she said, “why be you so hard with Davey?”

“Leave that, Jane,” he answered.  “’Tis mother has been at you—as if I didn’t know.  Little twoad’s all the better for licking.”

“He’s so small, and you’m so big.  He do hate you cruel, an’ your mother’s sore driven between you.”

“Mother’s soft.  The child would grow up a dolt if ’twasn’t for me.”

p. 217“Yet you had no brother to wallop you, Dick.”

“Faither was there, wasn’t he?  I call to mind his heavy hand, and always shall.  But if you mean I be a dolt, say it.”

“Us all knaw you’m cleverest man this side of Plymouth.”

“drop it, then, an’ tell of something different.”

Jane Stanberry did as she was bid: her arms went round Dick’s neck, and her lips were pressed against his face.  To the girl he represented her greatest experience.  Orphaned as a tender child, she had come to Cross Ways farm, in the lonely valley of the powder-mills, and there dwelt henceforth with her mother’s kinswoman, Mary Daccombe.

The establishment was small, and a larger company had not found means to subsist upon the hungry new-takes and scanty pasture-lands of Cross Ways.  Jonathan Daccombe and his wife, with two hinds, here pursued the hard business of living.  Richard was in private service as keeper of White Tor rabbit warren, distant a few miles from his home; and he divided his time between the farm and a little hut of a single chamber, perched in the lonely scene of his labour.  Of other children the Daccombes had none living save Davey, though two daughters and another son had entered into life at Cross Ways, pined through brief years there, and so departed.  The churchyard, as Jonathan p. 218Daccombe frankly declared, had been a good friend to him.

Jane was a deep-breasted, rough-haired girl of eighteen.  She possessed pale blue eyes, a general large-featured comeliness, and a nature that took life without complaining; and she held herself much blessed in the affection of her cousin Richard.  Talk of marriage for them was in the air, but it depended upon an increase of wages for Dick, and his master seemed little disposed to generosity.

The bridge by night was a favourite meeting and parting place for the lovers, because young Daccombe’s work in late autumn took him much upon the Moor after dark.  The time of trapping was come, and his copper wires glimmered by the hundred along those faintly marked rabbit runs, familiar to experienced eyes alone.  These he tended from dusk till dawn, and slept between the intervals of his labour within the little hut already mentioned.

A topic more entertaining than the child Davey now arose; and Jane, whose spirit was romantic, with a sort of romance not bred of her wild home, speculated upon an approaching event that promised some escape from the daily monotony of life at Cross Ways.

“To-morrow he’ll actually come,” she said.  “I’ve put the finishing touches to his room to-day. ............