Presently the company separated. Mr. Huggins was going by Sarah Jane's way, and he walked beside her; the Churchwards went to evening worship; Jarratt disappeared with his own anxious heart; and Mr. Weekes, hiding all evidence of inward thought, harnessed his pony and drove off to Lydford, to meet the train which was bringing his wife and her baskets home from Plymouth. CHAPTER VIII A REPRIMAND Now Nature thundered the hymn of the autumnal equinox; ancient trees waved their last before it; men told of a cloudburst, at midnight, over the central Moor. Every river roared in freshet; the springs overflowed and rolled down the grassy hills, where, in summer, no water was; cherry-coloured torrents, under banks of yellow spume, tumbled into the valleys; storm followed upon storm, and the fall of the year came in no peaceful guise, but like a ruthless army. Not until the epact did peace brood again, and fiery dawns, pallid noons and frosty nights gave the great waste sleeping into the hand of winter. Daniel Brendon settled to his work, and personal regrets that his position should be so unimportant were thrust to the back of his mind for the present by a greater matter. He was in love with Sarah Jane Friend, and knew it. To him fell the task of drawing peat with horse and cart from Amicombe Hill, and his journeys offered not a few opportunities of meeting with the woman. Once at her home, once in the peat works, he spoke with her. On the latter occasion she had just taken her father's dinner to him, and after Gregory was settled with the contents of a tin can and a little basket, Sarah proposed to Daniel that she should show him certain secret places in this ruin. The peat works had been her playground as a child, and she knew every hole and corner of them; but since silence and failure had made the place a home, Sarah chose rather to shun it. The very buildings scowled, where they huddled together and cringed to Time to spare them. She noted this, and felt that the place was mean and horrible, but with Dan beside her, ancient interests wakened, and she took him to see her haunts. "I had a dear little cubby hole here," she said, and showed him a great empty drum, from which one side had fallen. "This used to be filled with peat and be set spinning, so that the stuff should get broke up and dried," she explained; "but now 'tis as you see. I've often crept in there and gone to sleep by the hour. 'Tis full of dried heather. An old man that used to work with father spread it for me five years ago. He's dead, but the heather's there yet."