it that day. Once a
middle-aged man and woman surprised them where they sat behind a rock
near the edge of the great precipices. The man had grown warm and mopped
his face and let the wind cool it.

He was ugly, clumsily built, and displayed large calves in
knickerbockers and a hot, bald head.

"How hideous human beings can be," said Raymond after they had gone.

"He wasn't hideous in his wife's eyes, I expect."

"Middle-age is mercifully blind no doubt to its own horrors," he said.
"You can respect and even admire old age, like other ruins, if it's
picturesque, but middle-age is deadly always."

He smoked and they dawdled the hours away until Sabina declared it was
tea time. Then they sought a little inn at Chidcock and spent an hour
there.

The weather changed as the sun went westerly; the wind sank to a sigh
and brought with it rain clouds. But they were unconscious of such
accidents. Sabina longed for the cliffs again, so they turned homeward
by Seaton and Thorncombe Beacon and Eype Mouth. Their talk ran upon
marriage and Raymond swore that he could not wait long, while she urged
the importance to him of so doing.

"'Twould shake your brother badly if you wed yet awhile, be sure of
that," she said. "He would say that you weren't thinking of the work,
and it might tempt him to change his mind about making you a partner."

"Oh damn him. Don't talk about him--or work either. I shall never want
to work again, or think of work, or anything else on earth
till--till--What does he matter anyway--or his ideas? It's a free
country and a man has the right to plan his life his own way. If he
wants to get the best out of me, he'd better give me five hundred a
year to-morrow and tell me to marry you."

"We don't want five hundred. That's a fortune. I'm a good manager and
know very well how far money can go. With your money and mine."

"Yours? You won't have any--except mine. You'll stop work then and
live--not at Bridetown anyway."

"I was forgetting. It will be funny not to spin."

"You'll spin my happiness and my life and my fate and my children.
You'll have plenty of spinning. I'll spin for you and you'll spin for
me."

"You darling boy! I know you'll spin for me."

"Work! What's the good of working for yourself?" he asked. "Who the
devil cares about himself? It's because I don't care a button for myself
that I haven't bothered about the Mill. But when it comes to you--!
You're worth working for! I haven't b