CHAPTER I

THE PIXIES' PARLOUR


Phoebe Lyddon frowned, and, as an instant protest, twin dimples peeped
into life at the left corner of her bonny mouth. In regarding that
attractive ripple the down-drawn eyebrows were forgotten until they rose
again into their natural arches. A sweet, childish contour of face
chimed with her expression; her full lips were bright as the bunch of
ripe wood-strawberries at the breast of her cotton gown; her eyes as
grey as Dartmoor mists; while, for the rest, a little round chin, a
small, straight nose, and a high forehead, which Phoebe mourned and kept
carefully concealed under masses of curly brown hair, were the sole
features to be specially noted about her. She was a trifle below the
standard of height proper to a girl of nineteen, but all compact, of
soft, rounded lines, plump, fresh of colour, healthy, happy, sweet as a
ripe apple.

From a position upon swelling hillsides above the valley of a river, she
scanned the scene beneath, made small her eyes to focus the distance,
and so pursued a survey of meadow and woodland, yet without seeing what
she sought. Beneath and beyond, separated from her standpoint by
grasslands and a hedge of hazel, tangled thickets of blackthorn, of
bracken, and of briar sank to the valley bottom. Therein wound tinkling
Teign through the gorges of Fingle to the sea; and above it, where the
land climbed upward on the other side, spread the Park of Whiddou, with
expanses of sweet, stone-scattered herbage, with tracts of deep fern,