"Good-bye. I be dumb still—in a maze. I'm surely dreaming this."
"Tell nobody—not a soul except your wife. But ask her not to mention it."
Brendon went away entranced, and was nearly run over at the corner of the street by a waggon laden with straw. The carter laughed at him.
"Ban't often us catches you mooning about in the middle of the road!" he said.
Daniel climbed White Hill presently and looked down at Ruddyford. Then his eyes atoned for his lack of imagination, and helped him to understand and realize the prodigious thing that had happened.
This place would be his own. He would be master presently, and his child would follow him. It rushed upon him in a wave—drowned him almost, so that he panted for air. His mind turned to Woodrow, and, with heart and soul, he hoped that the farmer might enjoy length of days. He determined with himself that evermore he would add to his prayer for Woodrow that it might please God to let him see Truth before he died. He thought of himself being allowed to make Woodrow a Christian.
For a while he gazed, then considered Sarah Jane's joy. Suddenly his mind turned back to Hilary, and next he turned his body back also. He began to understand at last; he yearned to go before the giver again and say a little of what he felt. As for God, Dan believed that he was in His presence all the time. An under-current of thanksgiving rose from his soul, like smoke of incense.
Words from his favourite, Isaiah, ran through his head as he swept with great strides back to Lydford:
"That He may do His work, His strange work; and bring to pass His act, His strange act," the man kept repeating.
But the strange act went far deeper than Daniel conceived. Of the strange act, strange thoughts were bred in one man's spirit; and when he was alone, Woodrow pondered long of the amazing complexity of his own motives during the past few days, and of the impress stamped upon present thought and future resolution by this actual conversation with the husband of Sarah Jane. He was moved to find how little he had pretended, how much he had felt; how largely grain of truth mingled with the seed of falsehood sown by him upon Brendon's heart in that hour.