time
that little Will was two years old his parents viewed life, its good and
its evil, much as other Moor folks contemplated it. Phoebe's heart was
still sweet enough, but she grew more selfish for herself and her own,
more self-centred in great Will and little Will. They filled her
existence to the gradual exclusion of wider sympathies. Miller Lyddon
had given his grandson a silver mug on the day he was baptised, though
since that time the old man held more aloof from the life of Newtake
than Phoebe understood. Sometimes she wondered that he had never offered
to assist her husband practically, but Will much resented the suggestion
when Phoebe submitted it to him. There was no need for any such thing,
he declared. As for him, transitory ambitions and hopes gleamed up in
his career as formerly, though less often. So man and wife found their
larger natures somewhat crushed by the various immediate problems that
each day brought along with it. Beyond the narrow horizon of their own
concerns they rarely looked, and Chagford people, noting the change,
declared that life at Newtake was tying their tongues and lining their
foreheads. Will certainly grew more taciturn, less free of advice,
perhaps less frank than formerly. A sort of strangeness shadowed him,
and only his mother or his son could dispel it. The latter soon learnt
to understand his father's many moods, and would laugh or cry, show joy
or fear, according to the tune of the man's voice.

There came an evening in mid-September when Will sat at the open hearth
and smoked, with his eyes fixed on a fire of scads.[13] He remained very
silent, and Phoebe, busy about a small coat of red cloth, to keep the
cold from her little son's bones during the coming winter, knew that it
was not one of her husband's happiest evenings. His eyes were looking
through the fire and the wall behind it, through the wastes and
wildernesses beyond, through the granite hills to the far-away edge of
the world, where Fate sat spinning the threads of the lives of his loved
ones. Threads they looked, in his gloomy survey of that night, much
deformed with knot and tangle, for the Spinner cared nothing at all
about them. She suffered each to wind heedlessly away; she minded not
that they were ugly; she spared no strand of gold or silver from her
skein of human happiness to brighten the grey fabric of them. So it
seemed to Will, and his temper chimed with the rough night. The wind
howled and growled