Grace found him very agreeable company and, upon first mentioning at home that she sometimes met and spoke with him, her father did not take it amiss.
"Get the boy to tell you where that old demon on the hill has hidden my amphora," he said.
"As if he knew!" murmured Mrs. Malherb, who was a woman of literal mind.
"The boy doubtless knows nothing," her husband answered; "but 'tis within the bounds of possibility that he might find out."
Henceforward Grace, holding herself at liberty to do so, often met John Lee and often made appointments to meet him. He taught her Dartmoor; he rode his pony by her side and gloried in the manifold virtues of her new hunter, the great and gallant 'Cæsar.'
While Peter Norcot was at Fox Tor Farm, young John kept clear of it. Indeed, he had plenty of work when he chose to work, and toiled by fits and starts at peat-cutting, lichen-gathering, or attending upon some military sportsman from the War Prison. But his desire and ambition at eighteen years of age was to win employment in the kennels of Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt. From such a position, if blessed by good luck, he trusted some day to rise and become a whipper-in. Of any higher destiny he did not dream. To be huntsman was a position in life that rose almost as much above his hopes as to be Master.
Now, some while before Maurice Malherb had entered on to the Moor, so that he might see and meet his wife returning home, John Lee, walking near a spot very well known to him as one of Grace's favourite haunts, found her there where the grass made pleasant cushions amid the granite boulders upon the southern slope of Fox Tor; where the music of a little waterfall rose and fell softly at the pleasure of the wind; and where the Beam's mighty shoulders basked under the sun and took a tremulousness of outline in the hot air which arose from off them.
Rising suddenly out of the hollows where the streamlet ran, John Lee appeared within thirty yards of Grace, and, to his dismay and concern, discovered that she wept. Some coincidence of thought with the solemn natural things about her; some clash or chime of sadness at the spectacle of her future and the vast and featureless mountain uplifted before her eyes, struck the emotional chord that loosens tears, and Grace suffered them to flow and carry away a little of her sorrow in the glittering drops. She was young, and hope her proper heritage, therefore she grew happier presently, and when the miser's grandson appeared, hesitated, and, with a rueful countenance, began to creep away, she called to him and bade him come.
"I'm only crying, John Lee. Hast never seen a girl cry before?"
He advanced upon this, and his handsome young face was all blushes.