It is a question she never answers.
"Grassy Fordshire is your native heath," I remind her, jealously.
"Devon was my father's," she replies, "and mother's, too."
"Still," I insist, "you do not prefer it to your own?"
"It is beautiful," is her answer.
Had ever man so exasperating an antagonist? She declines utterly to be convinced; she talks of nothing but that ruddy land as if it always had been hers to boast of, is forever telling of ancient villages cuddled down in the softest corners of its hills and headlands to doze and dream in the English cloud-shadows and the sun—some of them lulled, she says, by the moorland music of winds among the granite tors, and waters falling down, down through those pastoral valleys to the sea; some lapped by the salt waves rippling into coves blue and tranquil as the sky above them, and others still in a sterner setting, clinging to edges in the very clefts of a wild and rugged coast, like weed and sea-shells left there by the fury of the autumn storms. So, she tells me, her Devon is; so I picture it as we sit together by the winter fire, while for the thousandth time she tells her story: how she and Robin, with my map between them, made that long journey which, years before it, the gypsy had found forewritten in her hand. It was the very pilgrimage that as a boy I planned and promised for myself when I should come to be a man, but have found no time for—yet my son has seen it, that land of the youth whose name he bears, so that, listening, I take his glowing word, as I took that of the youth before him, for its moorland heather and its flashing streams.
Robin, it seems, preferred north Devon—Lynton and Lynmouth and their crags and glens. Letitia, I note, while yet agreeing with his wildest adjectives, leans rather towards the south.
"But think," he says, "of Watersmeet and the Valley of Rocks, Aunt Letty!"
"I do think of them," she answers, "but think of Dartmoor, my dear."
"And so I do," is his reply.