The man stared at me with his pale gray eyes, whose colour was lost from candle light; and his voice as well as his body shook, while he cried,—

‘It is a lie, man. No daughter, and no son have I. Nor was ever child of mine left to starve in the wilderness. You are too big for me to tackle, and that makes you a coward for saying it.’ His hands were playing with a pickaxe helve, as if he longed to have me under it.

‘Perhaps I have wronged you, Simon,’ I answered very softly; for the sweat upon his forehead shone in the smoky torchlight; ‘if I have, I crave your pardon. But did you not bring up from Cornwall a little maid named “Gwenny,” and supposed to be your daughter?’

‘Ay, and she was my daughter, my last and only child of five; and for her I would give this mine, and all the gold will ever come from it.’

‘You shall have her, without either mine or gold; if you only prove to me that you did not abandon her.’

‘Abandon her! I abandon Gwenny!’ He cried with such a rage of scorn, that I at once believed him. ‘They told me she was dead, and crushed, and buried in the drift here; and half my heart died with her. The Almighty blast their mining-work, if the scoundrels lied to me!’

‘The scoundrels must have lied to you,’ I answered, with a spirit fired by his heat of fury: ‘the maid is living and with us. Come up; and you shall see her.’

‘Rig the bucket,’ he shouted out along the echoing gallery; and then he fell against the wall, and through the grimy sack I saw the heaving of his breast, as I have seen my opponent’s chest, in a long hard bout of wrestling. For my part, I could do no more than hold my tongue and look at him.

Without another word we rose to the level of the moors and mires; neither would Master Carfax speak, as I led him across the barrows. In this he was welcome to his own way, for I do love silence; so little harm can come of it. And though Gwenny was no beauty, her father might be fond of her.

So I put him in the cow-house (not to frighten the little maid), and the folding shutters over him, such as we used at the beestings; and he listened to my voice outside, and held on, and preserved himself. For now he would have scooped the earth, as cattle do at yearning-time, and as meekly and as patiently, to have his child restored to him. Not to make long tale of it—for this thing is beyond me, through want of true experience—I went and fetched his Gwenny forth from the back kitchen, where she was fighting, as usual, with our Betty.

‘Come along, you little Vick,’ I said, for so we called her; ‘I have a message to you, Gwenny, from the Lord in heaven.’

‘Don’t ‘ee talk about He,’ she answered; ‘Her have long forgatten me.’

‘That He has never done, you stupid. Come, and see who is in the cowhouse.’

Gwenny knew; she knew in a moment. Looking into my eyes, she knew; and hanging back from me to sigh, she knew it even better.

She had not much elegance of emotion, being flat and square all over; but none the less for that her heart came quick, and her words came slowly.

‘Oh, Jan, you are too good to cheat me. Is it joke you are putting upon me?’

I answered her with a gaze alone; and she tucked up her clothes and followed me because the road was dirty. Then I opened the door just wide enough for the child to to go her father, and left those two to have it out, as might be most natural. And they took a long time about it.