Foxes, however, are sacred upon Dartmoor, even in the warrens; though, if evil language could have hurt them, it must have gone ill with a vixen and five brave cubs, whose home was hard by in the granite bosom of White Tor. CHAPTER III Anthony Maybridge arrived at Cross Ways, and amongst the various items of his luggage he was only concerned for his gun-case. Mrs. Daccombe greeted the youth with old-time courtesy, and her husband soon perceived that the newcomer would be a pupil in little more than name. Anthony, indeed, made an energetic start, and for the space of a full week resolutely dogged the farmer’s footsteps; but his enterprise sprang from a whim rather than a fixed enthusiasm. On the spur of the moment, before various alternatives, he had decided upon farming; but the impulse toward that life waned, and in a month the lad found Richard Daccombe’s society much more congenial than that of his taciturn parent. Good store of snipe and plover were now upon the Moor, and they drew young Maybridge more surely than the business of manuring hay lands or getting in the mangel-wurzel crop. With Dick, indeed, he struck into close fellowship, founded on the basis of the gun; and with Jane Stanberry he also became more friendly than anybody but herself was aware. Socially, Maybridge stood separated from his host by the accident of success alone. Daccombe and Anthony’s father were old acquaintances, and the latter, a prosperous nurseryman at Tavistock, sometimes fell in with his friend when the hounds met at the powder-mills. The boy found Jane sympathetic, and being possessed of a warm heart but little sense, he soon revealed to her the true cause of his present life and temporary banishment from home. “If you can believe it,” he said, when she met him returning from a day with the snipe in the bogs,—“if you can believe it, I shall be surprised. I always thought a man ought to look up to women as the soul of truth and all that. I was engaged—secretly; and there was another chap I hardly knew by sight even; and that girl was playing with me—like you play with a hooked fish; the only difference being she didn’t want to land me. In fact, I was the bait, if you understand such a blackguard thing, and she fished with me and caught the other chap. I could mention names, but what’s the use?” “How horrid!” said Jane. “I’m sure I’d very much rather not know who ’twas.” “Well, anyway, the other chap took the bait. And the moment she got him she threw me over. _After we were engaged_, mind you! And the rum thing is, looking at it from a mere worldly point of view, that I shall be worth tons more money than that chap ever will be.” “She didn’t really care about you, then?”