Barron drew rapidly, and Joan—ever ready to talk to a willing listener when her confidence was won—prattled on, turning the conversation as usual to the matters she loved. Upon her favorite subjects she dared not open her mouth at home, and even her lover refused to listen to the legends of the land, but they were part of the girl's life notwithstanding, drawn into her blood from her mother, a thousand times more real and precious than even the promised heaven of Luke Gospeldom, not to be wholly smothered at any time. Occasionally, indeed, uneasy fears that discussion of such concerns was absolutely sinful kept her dumb for a week, then the religious wave swept on, and Cornish folk-lore, with its splendor and romance, again filled her heart and bubbled from her lips. Her little stories pleased Barron mightily. Excitement heightened Joan's beauty. Her absolute innocence at the age of seventeen struck him as remarkable. It seemed curious that a child born in a cottage, where realities and facts are apt to roughly front boy and girl alike, should know so little. She was a beautiful, primitive creature, with strange store of fairy fable in her mind; a treasury which brought color and joy into life. So she prattled, and the man painted.
Pure artistic interest filled Barron's brain at this season; not a shadow of passion made his pencil shaky or his eye dim; he began to learn the girl with as little emotion as he had learned the gorse. He asked her to unfasten the top button of her dress that he might see the lines of her plump throat, and she complied without hesitation or ceasing from her chatter. He noted where the tan on her neck faded to white under her dress, and occupied himself with all the artistic problems she unconsciously spread before him; while she merely talked, garnered in his questions and comments on all she said, and found delight in the apparent interest and entertainment her conversation afforded him.
"I seed a maggotty-pie [Footnote: Maggotty-pie—Magpie.] comin' along this marnin'," she said. "Wan's bad an' a sign o' sorrer; but if you spits twice over your left shoulder it doan't matter so much. But I be better off than many maidens, 'cause I be saint-protected like."
"That's interesting, Joan."
"Faither'd be mad if I let on 'bout it to him, so I doesn't. He doan't b'lieve much in dead saints, though Carnwall's full of 'em. Have 'e heard tell 'bout Saint Madern?"
"Ah, the saint of the well?"
"Iss, an' the brook as runs by the Madern chapel."
"I sketched the little ruin of the baptistery some time ago."
"'Twas tho't a deal of wance, an' the holy water theer was reckoned better for childern than any doctor's traade as ever was. My mother weer a Madern cheel; an' 'er ordained I should be as well, an' when faither was to sea, as fell out just 'pon the right day, mother took me up theer. That was my awn mother as is dead. More folks b'lieved in the spring then than what do now, 'cause that was sebenteen year agone. An' from bein' a puny cheel I grawed a bonny wan arter dipping. But some liked the crick-stone better for lil baabies than even the Madern brook."
"Mên-an-tol that stone is called?"