ce inside the place Adam 'ud
ha' had me, after all. But there! all that's past and gone long ago."

There was another pause, which Reuben broke by saying suddenly, "Joan,
should you take it very out of place if I was to ask you whether after a
bit you could marry me? I dare say now such a thought never entered
your head before."

"Well, iss it has," said Joan; 'and o' late, ever since that blessed
dear spoke they words he did, I've often fell to wonderin' if so be 't
'ud ever come to pass. Not, mind, that I should ha' bin put out if 't
had so happened that you'd never axed me, like, but still I thought
sometimes as how you might, and then agen I says, 'Why should he,
though?'"

"There's many a reason why _I_ should ask _you_, Joan," said Reuben,
smiling at her unconscious frankness, "though very few why you should
consent to take a man whose love another woman has flung away."

"Awh, so far as that goes, the both of us is takin' what's another's
orts, you knaw," smiled Joan.

"Then is it agreed?" asked Reuben, stretching out his hand.

"Iss, so far as I goes 'tis, with all my heart." Then as she took his
hand a change came to her April face, and looking at him through her
swimming eyes she said, "And very grateful too I'm to 'ee, Reuben, for I
don't knaw by neither another wan who'd take up with a poor heart-broke
maid like me, and they she's looked to all her life disgraced by others
and theyselves."

Reuben pressed the hand that Joan had given to him, and drawing it
through his arm the two walked on in silence, pondering over the
unlooked-for ending to the strange events they both had lately passed
through. Joan's heart was full of a contentment which made her think,
"How pleased Adam will be! and won't mother be glad! and Uncle Zebedee
'ull have somebody to look to now and keep poor Jonathan straight and
put things a bit in order;" while Reuben, bewildered by the thoughts
which crowded to his mind, semed unable to disentangle them. Could it be
possible that he, Reuben May, was going down to live at Polperro, a
place whose very name he had once taught himself to abominate?--that he
could be willingly casting his lot amid a people whom he had but lately
branded as thieves, outcasts, reprobates? Involuntarily his eyes turned
toward Joan, and a nimbus in which perfect charity was intertwined with
great love and singleness of heart seemed to float about her head and
shed its radiance on her face; and its sight was