They had, as Sam cannily observed, the advantages of a private room at an hotel without paying for it--and abrogated them. In the autumn they had isolated their joy from others: now it brimmed from them and affected all the people of the Inn, making the long nights short. Good listeners were a godsend to the Dale in winter, and the shepherds, dropping from heaven knew how far, found a rare satisfaction in telling this attentive audience tales of the fells, of sheep wanderers that strayed as wide afield as Derbyshire, of dogs that ran amok and ravaged the flocks they ought to tend, of the epic Beast of Ennerdale, of the legends of John Peel and all the sagas of the Lakes. It needed little to make these dalesmen happy, nothing beyond a patient ear for a slow, rambling narrative--a long chain strung with pearls of racy episode--or an hour of Effie at the piano, when the dalesmen disappointed her by knowing no ballads, but having, instead, a sound acquaintance with the latest music-hall songs stacked in the cupboard at the Inn. In here, in the smoke room, they were knowing wags, in the kitchen they were themselves, talking shop, and therefore interesting. Effie and Sam preferred them in the kitchen, telling their slowly-moving tales, to seeing them in their smoke-room mood, imitating badly a thing not worth the imitating. But, in either room, they helped them to be happy. Well coated they would go each night from the tobacco-laden air of the kitchen down the road to the bridge over Marbeck Force. A great peace brooded there. Even the stream ran softly now when all the surface water of its gathering ground was frozen hard. They stood there on the bridge while the moon rose over Hartle Pike and scattered silver on the snow. Great shadows leaped to instant birth below the Pike whose comely top was one black silhouette against the brightened sky, and the beauty of the valley, seen by day with an almost Alpine harshness, mellowed in the moonlight to a subtle luminosity. Behind them were the lights of the friendly Inn; near by the low church tower saluted God amongst the pines, and all around them spread the lustrous radiance of the moon-flushed Dale. For the hundredth time he restrained his impulse to repeat his words, “We’ll build a tabernacle here,” and Effie read his thought. “We’re making the good beginning here,” she said. “We’re practising and I think we grow.” “We grow in happiness,” he said, which he thought good argument for staying at Marbeck.