indeed," was all Joanna found to say.

He told her of the old monks of Canterbury who had covered the Marsh
with the altars of Thomas a Becket.

"We got shut of 'em all on the fifth of November," said Joanna, "as we
sing around here on bonfire nights--and 'A halfpenny loaf to feed the
Pope, a penn'orth of cheese to choke him,' as we say."

All the same he enjoyed the expeditions that they had together in her
trap, driving out on some windy-skied March day, to fill the hours
snatched from her activities at Ansdore and his muddlings at North
Farthing, with all the sea-green sunny breadth of Walland, and still
more divinely with Walland's secret places--the shelter of tall reeds by
the Yokes Sewer, or of a thorn thicket making a tent of white blossom
and spindled shadows in the midst of the open land.

Sometimes they crossed the Rhee Wall on to Romney Marsh, and he showed
her the great church at Ivychurch, which could have swallowed up in its
nave the two small farms that make the village. He took her into the
church at New Romney and showed her the marks of the Great Flood,
discolouring the pillars for four feet from the ground.

"Doesn't it thrill you?--Doesn't it excite you?" he teased her, as they
stood together in the nave, the church smelling faintly of hearthstones.

"How long ago did it happen?"

"In the year of our Lord twelve hundred and eighty seven the Kentish
river changed his mouth, and after swilling out Romney Sands and
drowning all the marsh from Honeychild to the Wicks, did make himself a
new mouth in Rye Bay, with which mouth he swallowed the fifty taverns
and twelve churches of Broomhill, and--"

"Oh, have done talking that silly way--it's like the Bible, only there's
no good in it."

Her red mouth was close to his in the shadows of the church--he kissed
it....

"Child!"

"Oh, Martin--"

She was faintly shocked because he had kissed her in church, so he drew
her to him, tilting back her chin.

"You mustn't" ... but she had lost the power of gainsaying him now, and
made no effort to release herself. He held her up against the pillar and
gave her mouth another idolatrous kiss before he let her go.

"If it happened all that while back, they might at least have got the
marks off by this time," she said, tucking away her loosened hair.

Martin laughed aloud--her little reactions of common sense after their
passionate moments never failed to amuse and delight him.

"You'd have had it off