with him hurt her, that his kisses made her giddy to sickness, that all
his gifts put together were less to her than one treasure she was too
weak to destroy--the last letter Will had written. Once or twice, not to
her future husband, but to the miller, Phoebe had ventured faintly to
question still the promise of this great step; but Mr. Lyddon quickly
overruled all doubts, and assisted John Grimbal in his efforts to hasten
the ceremony. Upon this day, Old Christmas Eve, the wedding-day lay not
a month distant and, afterwards the husband designed to take his wife
abroad for a trip to South Africa. Thus he would combine business and
pleasure, and return in the spring to witness the completion of his
house. Chagford highly approved the match, congratulated Phoebe on her
fortune, and felt secretly gratified that a personage grown so important
as John Grimbal should have chosen his life's partner from among the
maidens of his native village.

Now the pair walked over the snow; and silent and stealthy as the
vanished fox, a grey figure followed after them. Dim as some moon-spirit
against the brightness, this shape stole forward under the rough hedge
that formed a bank and threw a shadow between meadow and stream. In
repose the grey man, for a man it was, looked far less substantial than
the stationary outlines of fences and trees; and when he moved it had
needed a keen eye to see him at all. He mingled with the moonlight and
snow, and became a part of a strange inversion of ordinary conditions;
for in this white, hushed world the shadows alone seemed solid and
material in their black nakedness, in their keen sharpness of line and
limit, while things concrete and ponderable shone out a silvery medley
of snow-capped, misty traceries, vague of outline, uncertain of shape,
magically changed as to their relations by the unfamiliar carpet now
spread between them.