isn't money that would tempt you.' He spoke in a very low
voice, though no one was within earshot. 'Don't think I make any mistake
about _that_! But I have to show you that there's something in me.
I wouldn't marry any woman that thought I made love to her out of
interest.'

Nancy began to draw on her gloves, and smiled, just biting her lower
lip.

'Will you give me a couple of years, from to-day? I won't bother you.
It's honour bright!'

'I'll think about it,' Nancy repeated.

'Whilst you're away?'

'Yes, whilst I'm away at Teignmouth.'

'And tell me when you come back?'

'Tell you--how long. Yes.'

And she rose.

CHAPTER 4

From the mouth of Exe to the mouth of Teign the coast is uninteresting.
Such beauty as it once possessed has been destroyed by the railway.
Cliffs of red sandstone drop to the narrow beach, warm between the blue
of sky and sea, but without grandeur, and robbed of their native
grace by navvy-hewing, which for the most part makes of them a mere
embankment: their verdure stripped away, their juttings tunnelled, along
their base the steel parallels of smoky traffic. Dawlish and Teignmouth
have in themselves no charm; hotel and lodging-house, shamed by the
soft pure light that falls about them, look blankly seaward, hiding what
remains of farm or cottage in the older parts. Ebb-tide uncovers no fair
stretch of sand, and at flood the breakers are thwarted on a bulwark of
piled stone, which supports the railway, or protects a promenade.

But inland these discontents are soon forgotten; there amid tilth and
pasture, gentle hills and leafy hollows of rural Devon, the eye rests
and the mind is soothed. By lanes innumerable, deep between banks of
fern and flower; by paths along the bramble-edge of scented meadows;
by the secret windings of copse and brake and stream-worn valley--a way
lies upward to the long ridge of Haldon, where breezes sing among the
pines, or sweep rustling through gorse and bracken. Mile after mile
of rustic loveliness, ever and anon the sea-limits blue beyond grassy
slopes. White farms dozing beneath their thatch in harvest sunshine;
hamlets forsaken save by women and children, by dogs and cats and
poultry, the labourers afield. Here grow the tall foxgloves, bending a
purple head in the heat of noon; here the great bells of the convolvulus
hang thick from lofty hedges, massing their pink and white against dark
green leafage; here amid shadowed undergrowth trail th