with your broom, and that's all you think about
it. But look here, child--what if it happened again?"

"It can't."

"How do you know?"

"It can't--I know it."

"But if it happened then it could happen again."

"There ain't been a flood on the Marsh in my day, nor in my poor
father's day, neither. Sometimes in February the White Kemp brims a bit,
but I've never known the roads covered. You're full of old tales. And
now let's go out, for laughing and love-making ain't the way to behave
in church."

"The best way to behave in church is to get married."

She blushed faintly and her eyes filled with tears.

They went out, and had dinner at the New Inn, which held the memory of
their first meal together, in that huge, sag-roofed dining-room, then so
crowded, now empty except for themselves. Joanna was still given to
holding forth on such subjects as harness and spades, and to-day she
gave Martin nearly as much practical advice as on that first occasion.

"Now, don't you waste your money on a driller--we don't give our sheep
turnips on the Marsh. It's an Inland notion. The grass here is worth a
field of roots. You stick to grazing and you'll keep your money in your
pocket and never send coarse mutton to the butcher."

He did not resent her advice, for he was learning humility. Her superior
knowledge and experience of all practical matters was beginning to lose
its sting. She was in his eyes so adorable a creature that he could
forgive her for being dominant. The differences in their natures were
no longer incompatibilities, but gifts which they brought each other--he
brought her gifts of knowledge and imagination and emotion, and she
brought him gifts of stability and simplicity and a certain saving
commonness. And all these gifts were fused in the glow of personality,
in a kind bodily warmth, in a romantic familiarity which sometimes found
its expression in shyness and teasing.

They loved each other.

Sec.16

Martin had always wanted to go out on the cape at Dunge Ness, that
tongue of desolate land which rakes out from Dunge Marsh into the sea,
slowly moving every year twenty feet towards France. Joanna had a
profound contempt of Dunge Ness--"not enough grazing on it for one
sheep"--but Martin's curiosity mastered her indifference and she
promised to drive him out there some day. She had been once before with
her father, on some forgotten errand to the Hope and Anchor inn.

It was an afternoon in May