The girl stared at him steadily, without a tremor, without the flick of an eyelid, and then, bending, rubbed her forehead, cat-like, against his shoulder.
“Marry,” she purred, “I’ve seen worse than that where I came from.”
For answer John caught her up in his arms and marched, shouting with rough laughter, into the house, the tumbler girl clasped tight to his breast, her arms about his neck.
To the victor the spoils!
CHAPTER III
Bosula—“The Owls’ House”—lay in the Keigwin Valley, about six miles southwest of Penzance. The valley drained the peninsula’s bare backbone of tors, ran almost due south until within a mile and a half of the sea, formed a sharp angle, ran straight again and met the English Channel at Monks Cove. A stream threaded its entire length, its source a holy well on Bartinny Downs (the water of which, taken at the first of the moon, was reputed a cure for chest complaints). Towards the river’s source the valley was a shallow swamp, a wide bed of tussocks, flags, willow and thorn, the haunt of snipe and woodcock in season, but as it neared Bosula it grew narrower and deeper until it emptied into the sea, pinched to a sharp gorge between precipitous cliffs.
It was a surprising valley. You came from the west over the storm-swept, treeless table-land that drives into the Atlantic like a wedge and is beaten upon by three seas, came with clamorous salt gales buffeting you this way and that, pelting you with black showers of rain, came suddenly to the valley rim and dropped downhill into a different climate, a serene, warm place of trees with nothing to break the peace but the gentle chatter of the stream. When the wind set roundabouts of south it was not so quiet. The cove men had a saw—
“When the river calls the sea,
Fishing there will be;
When the sea calls the river,