But Bassett shook his head, and, indeed, facts presently proved that he was right, the girl mistaken. Nicholas made no haste to depart from the Moor. He took mighty rides over it upon his brimstone-coloured horse; he endeavoured to win the friendship of all men, and nearly succeeded, for he was generous and a good sportsman—sure credentials to the regard of the folk. Only Bassett and another here and there maintained a stubborn and doglike mistrust. Nor were the sceptics free of reasons for their attitude. Elias was laughed at as a man ousted from hope by a better-equipped rival, and the fact that his undue bitterness was naturally set to the account of defeated love, chastened his tongue; but in truth Mr. Bassett’s regard for Minnie had little to do with his emotion. He was an honest man, and not prejudiced overmuch against young Merle by their relations. Nevertheless he had a lodged loathing against him, read craft into his apparent candour, secret policy into his open-handedness, simulation into his great affectation of being fellow-well-met with all. A lad of no imagination, Bassett none the less went heavily in this matter, and was oppressed with the sense of evil at hand. A dull premonition, to which he lent himself reluctantly, spread events in their sequence before him ere they fell out. Then accident presented him with a solid fact, and that fact, as is the nature of such things, opened the door to many problems. But some weeks before the day that his acquired knowledge set young Bassett’s brains upon the whirl, there had happened the foreseen, and Minnie was engaged to be married to her cousin. Liquor ran free on the evening of the great news, and few were those who left the “Ring o’ Bells” in silence and sobriety. Elias at least was not among them, for, faced with the engagement, he abandoned his antagonism in a sort of despair, told himself that it was idle to fight fate, single-handed, and so drank Minnie’s health far into the night and went home to his mother’s cottage as drunk as any man need desire or deplore to be. The time was then late summer, and the wedding was fixed to take place at Widecombe in November. This matter determined, life pursued its level way, and Nicholas Merle, who appeared to have no business or affairs that called him elsewhere, dwelt on at the “Ring o’ Bells,” enjoyed the best that the inn could furnish him, and spent his time between courting his cousin, in a manner much to her taste, and riding far afield over the land. Sometimes she accompanied him on her Dartmoor pony, sometimes he went alone. There came a day in the bar when Gammer Trout was able to furnish the company with a morsel of news. “Master Merle got a packet by the mail essterday,” she said. “Fust as ever he’ve had since he comed; an’ not to his taste neither. ’Twill call him off, for he set his teeth and frowned when he read it, an’ said as he must be gone in a week an’ wouldn’t be back much afore the wedding.”