"As near content as I'm ever likely to get. I've simplified my life to the limits. I said to myself, 'Since you can't have what you wanted, have nothing.' And I have nothing."
"That cuts both ways, I reckon," declared Dinah; "you escape a lot of bother, but you lose a good few things that make life better, don't you?"
"To cut a loss is a very wise deed," he answered. "So it seemed to me anyway. That may be wrong, too, in some cases; but if you've got no choice, then you must. Now let me show you where I was born, if you're not tired."
Presently, in the valley far beneath these downs, where the hillside fell to the north and a stream ran in the bottom of a woody coomb, Maynard pointed to a little building. It stood where the land began to ascend again and climb to those rugged piles of granite known as Hound Tor Rocks.
"D'you see that ruin alongside the green croft beside the edge of the woods? That was a fair-sized cottage twenty years ago. My father worked at Hedge Barton, near by, and we lived there till he died. Then we scattered."
Dinah regarded the spot with interest.
"To think of that," she said.
"My playmate was my sister Milly," continued Lawrence. "We were the eldest, and after us came two girls, who both died. Then my mother was with child again, and that brings me to the face on the rock, what you want to hear about."
Dinah, as her custom was, had flung herself entirely into these interests of another being. She had an instinct to do this: it was no art, but a natural impulse in her. At this moment nothing on earth seemed more important and desirable to know than these passages from the boyhood of Lawrence Maynard.
"Such things bring you home to my mind," she said. "Now I'll have a better idea about you; and then you'll be more interesting."