It was dark by this time, and the Ebenezer love-feast was over, so far as the eating and drinking and prayer-meeting were concerned. The god of good cheer had been worshipped, and now the goddess of common wayside love was receiving incense. Autumn invariably discovers those hardy perennials of the hedges and ditches--lovers--leaning against gates as if they were tied there. The fields and the moor are too wet to sprawl on, so at the end of October the gate season sets in, and continues until spring dries the grass. The gates are nothing like so damp as the hedges, and are much softer than boundary walls, although the latter are not without their patrons. Lovers are orthodox folk, who never depart from their true religion, or seek to subtract any clause from their creed. The young girl knows that her mother was courted against a gate, and that her grandmother was courted against a gate, so she is quite ready to be courted against a gate. It must be difficult to feel the necessary ardour, when several degrees of frost are nipping their noses, and a regular Dartmoor wind whirls up and down the lanes; but these gate-leaners manage it somehow. Peter was having a pleasant day. He had followed up his success at Master's expense with a little bout at Mary's, and it was with a feeling of unalloyed satisfaction with himself that he started for home, returning thanks after his own manner to the god who presides over beer-houses. The benign influence of malted liquors was over him, stimulating his progress, rendering him heedless of the dark, and impervious to the cold. It was an unpleasant night, not frosty, but choked with clouds, and filled with raw mist. Peter had passed several gates, most of them occupied by couples finishing the day in a devout fashion, but he had said nothing, not even the customary "good-night," because it was not lawful to speak to people when thus privily engaged. Couples are supposed to be invisible while courting, and with the full knowledge of this point of etiquette they usually conduct themselves as if they were. Peter got up upon the moor, where the wind twisted his beard about as if it had been a furze-bush, and made his way beside one of the boundary walls which denoted some commoner's field. It was the usual Dartmoor wall, composed of blocks of granite placed one above the other in an irregular pattern without mud or method, each stone kept in place by the weight of those above it; a wall which a boy could have pulled down quickly one stone at a time, but if unmolested would stand and defy the storms for ever. It was a long wall, and there were three gates in it, but no lovers against them; at least not against the first two. But as Peter approached the last, which was well out on the moor where nobody but himself would be likely to pass that night, he heard voices, or rather one voice, speaking loudly, either in anger or in passion, and he recognised that it was Pendoggat who was speaking.