“Wheer be the gen’leman to? Not here? Then I can speak. Aw jimmery, what a hoss—if ’tis a hoss! Never seed the like in all my years! Come an’ catch sight for yourselves, sawls, for you’ll never believe me. Eyes like a human, an’ a body all so bright as brimstone, to the last hair in the tail of un!” While the loafers inspected a big horse of unusual colour, Nicholas Merle introduced himself to his cousin. They had never met before, and a deep interest and instant friendship wakened in Minnie’s breast for the only relation she possessed in the world. He was a tall, resolute man of thirty-five, with strange oaths and fatherly manner. He declared that chance alone brought him so far south, and that being at Exeter he had determined with himself to see his relations. “Not until I reached Moreton did I hear of our uncle’s death; then I should have come no farther, but I knew of your existence, and thought I would at least get a memory of you. And a very pleasant memory it will be, Cousin, for you’re the queen of the Dartmoors, I hear, and so you should be. I never want to see a prettier maid.” But these statements, despite the speaker’s convincing utterance and bluff manner of discourse, were by no means true. Nicholas Merle, chancing upon a journal nearly a year old, had read therein of his miser uncle’s passing; and he knew that only one life stood between him and the dead man’s fortune. So he forsook his usual haunts, to the satisfaction of better men, and galloped westward to look into the matter for himself. CHAPTER II Within less than a week of the young man’s arrival at the “Ring o’ Bells,” Minnie was heartily grieved that she had commissioned Mrs. Trout to hint a hope in Elias Bassett’s ear. She and the gamekeeper had indeed been close friends before her uncle’s death, and it troubled her that after the change in her fortunes Elias avoided the old intimacy and feared to be with her alone. Yet she admired him still, and more than ever, contrasted him with those who hummed about her like hungry wasps, since her prosperity. Now, however, to her secret shame, Minnie Merle began to see that she had dropped the handkerchief too soon. Upon the very day—within the actual hour—that Bassett received his polite hint, a greater than Bassett burst upon the vision of Minnie, and soon she hung on her cousin’s words, quite dazzled by the dashing manners of him, reduced to daily blushes by his gallant address and courtly fashion of love-making. These things, however, Elias did not perceive; nor did the newcomer dazzle him. When the coach from Exeter to Plymouth left a box for Mr. Merle, and he blossomed forth next Sunday in russet and plum-colour, Bassett called him a popin-jay; and the keeper killed Minnie’s old friendship at a breath by telling her in round terms, with the forceful periods of that time, that her cousin was either less than he proclaimed himself, or more.