"That day the wind blew so," she calls to mind, "that morning when we rode to Tavistock."
"Tavistock?" I always ask. "Tavistock? Where have I heard that name? Do all Devonshire roads lead up to Tavistock?"
She only smiles.
"You should see Tavistock," she says, and resumes her memories. I sit quite helpless between the combatants. They differ widely, one might think, to hear their voices rising and falling in warm debate, yet listening to their words I detect nothing but a rivalry of praise, an effort on the part of each to outdo the other, as I tell them, in pæans and benisons on what I am led inevitably to believe is the fairest of earthly dwelling-places.
When Robin withdraws his youthful vigor and goes off to bed, or if he is away at school, from which he writes such letters as I wish Dove could but see, the talk is tranquil by our hearth, or little by little drops quite away.
"Such lands breed men," observes Letitia for the hundredth time. It is her old, loved theory, the worth and grace of a rare environment, of which she speaks, sewing in the fire-light. "The race must be hardy to wring its living from such shores and heights."
"True," I answer, thinking of the wreckers and smugglers who haunted those creeks and coves in years gone by—more lawless summers than the quiet one which found a woman on the very sands their heels had furrowed, or choosing flowers to press on the very cliffs they climbed with their spray-wet booty. I think vaguely of the soldiers and sailors who fought the battles whose dates and meanings it was Letitia's joy to teach in the red-brick school-house. I think more vividly of great John Ridd and Amyas Leigh, and then—a clearer vision—I remember that other, that later Devonshire lad who was flesh and blood to me; and sitting here by my Grassy Fordshire fire, a man grown gray who was once a boy eating the slice two lovers spread for him, I keep their covenant.
You go up from Plymouth, Letitia tells me, and by-and-by you are on the moors, marvelling; and you like everything, but you love Tavistock. It is in a valley, with the Tavy running beneath that bridge of which she is forever dreaming, for, as she stood there watching the waters playing, and listening to their song, she said:
"Here Robert Saxeholm was a boy. How often he must have stood here!"
"Robin Saxeholm?" asked a clear voice almost at her side; and Letitia turned. A pretty English lady stood there smiling and offering her hand.