Meantime Daniel Sweetland was riding bare-backed over Dartmoor to his new home.
He knew the way very well and threaded many a bog and leapt a stream or two; then breasted a hill and looked down where, like a glow-worm, one little warm light glimmered in the silver and ebony of the nocturnal desert.
For the first time that day his heart grew soft.
“Her—all alone!” he thought. “I might have knowed she’d come. That’s her place now; an’ mine be alongside her!”
He formed the resolution to see Minnie at any cost.
“Us’ll eat supper alone together for once, though the devil gets the reckoning,” he said. “I lay my pretty have had no stomach for victuals this night.”
Five minutes later a horse stopped at Hangman’s Hut, and Minnie, unlocking the door, found herself in her husband’s arms.
“Ban’t much of a wedding night,” he said; “but such as ’tis us’ll make the most of it. I’ve foxed ’em very nice with a yarn about that burglary, of which I know no more than the dead really. But you’ll hear tell about that presently. An’ to-night they’ll have a pretty walk to Princetown, for the only horse except this one within five miles belongs to Johnny Beer; an’ ’tis tired out after the journey to Moreton.”
Minnie was far less calm than when she left him in the morning. Even her steady nerve failed her now, and for the only time in his life Daniel saw her weep.