A sweeter trysting-place these lovers could not have chosen. The mossy banks were starred with celandines, now closing with the lengthening shadows; hollies, dense and glossy-leaved, formed a complete screen around, and down in the bottom, among grey pebbles, a spring bubbled up, as clear as crystal and cold as ice, widening into a pool, in which the lovely slim bodies of the sunbeams by day, and the moon-beams by night, bathed and swam.
Joel was in a lively humour, but Lucy would be serious.
"Oh, lad, lad," she whispered, "take me away from Greystones. I'm so unhappy there."
"Unhappy! What or who has been frightening you, Lucy? Is it the old woman?"
She shuddered.
"I'm sure the place is haunted."
"So it is—by your great-grandmother. It's not canny to have a great-grandmother, Lucy. She ought to be a ghost by now."
"Oh, I'd rather have her as she is," replied the girl. "She can't get out of the four-poster—at any rate she wont till she's dead. Then"—she shivered again, and moved closer to him—"she would soon be after us, keeking through the bushes, and crying out in that sharp voice of hers: 'Lucy, Lucy, away to your bed!' But, Joel, I wish you would tell her that you want to marry me."
"God forbid," he said fervently.
"Why not, Joel? Don't you want to marry me? She's fonder of you than she is of me."