"Well I know that. 'Brave!' 'Tis too mild a a word for you. You've come through your life in a way that would maze the people with wonder if they only knew it. So secret, so patient, so clever. Never was heard or known the like. A wonderful wife—a wife in ten thousand."
The sun began to sink where Cornwall, like a purple cloud, rose far off against the sky; yet still the undulations of the land, mingling with glory, melted into each other under the sunset, and still North Wood shone above the shadows. But a deep darkness began to stretch upwards into it, where the Dewerstone's immense shade was projected across the valley. At length only the corner of the forest flashed a final fire; then that, too, vanished, and the benighted trees sighed and shivered and massed themselves into amorphous dimness under the twilight.
The man and woman stopped together a while longer, and after that their converse ended. They caressed and prepared to go back by different ways into the world.
"Come good or evil, fair weather or foul, may we have a few happy returns yet of this day; and may I live to find you the lily-of-the-valley again once or twice before the end," he said.
For answer she kissed him again, but could not trust herself to speak.
CHAPTER VII
Life is a compromise and a concession. According to the measure of our diplomacy, so much shall we win from our fellows; according to our physical endowment, so much will Nature grant. All men are envoys to the court of the world, and it depends upon the power behind them whether they are heard and heeded, or slighted and ignored. To change the figure, each among us sets up his little shop in the social mart and tries to tempt the buyer; but few are they who expose even necessary wares, and fewer still the contemporary purchasers who know a treasure when they see it.
An accident now lifted the curtain from Humphrey Baskerville's nature, threw him for a day into the companionship of his kind, and revealed to passing eyes a gleam of the things hidden within him. No conscious effort on his part contributed to this illumination, for he was incapable of making such. His curse lay in this: that he desired to sell, yet lacked wit to win the ear of humanity, or waken interest in any buyer's bosom. Yet now the goods he offered with such ill grace challenged attention. Accident focussed him in a crowd; and first the people were constrained to admit his presence of mind at a crisis, and then they could not choose but grant the man a heart.
It happened that on the day before Princetown pony fair Mr. Baskerville's groom fell ill and had to keep his bed; but twenty ponies were already at Princetown. Only Humphrey and his man knew their exact value, and the market promised to be unusually good. His stock represented several hundred pounds, for Mr. Baskerville bred a special strain possessing the Dartmoor stamina with added qualities of speed and style. The irony of chance ordained that one who despised all sport should produce some of the best polo ponies in the West of England.