A sweeter trysting-place these lovers could not have chosen. The mossy banks were starred with celandines, now closing with the lengthening shadows; hollies, dense and glossy-leaved, formed a complete screen around, and down in the bottom, among grey pebbles, a spring bubbled up, as clear as crystal and cold as ice, widening into a pool, in which the lovely slim bodies of the sunbeams by day, and the moon-beams by night, bathed and swam. Joel was in a lively humour, but Lucy would be serious. "Oh, lad, lad," she whispered, "take me away from Greystones. I'm so unhappy there." "Unhappy! What or who has been frightening you, Lucy? Is it the old woman?" She shuddered. "I'm sure the place is haunted." "So it is--by your great-grandmother. It's not canny to have a great-grandmother, Lucy. She ought to be a ghost by now." "Oh, I'd rather have her as she is," replied the girl. "She can't get out of the four-poster--at any rate she wont till she's dead. Then"--she shivered again, and moved closer to him--"she would soon be after us, keeking through the bushes, and crying out in that sharp voice of hers: 'Lucy, Lucy, away to your bed!' But, Joel, I wish you would tell her that you want to marry me." "God forbid," he said fervently. "Why not, Joel? Don't you want to marry me? She's fonder of you than she is of me." He plucked a bunch of the little yellow flowers and twined them in her curls. "You're very pretty to-night, Lucy," he answered, "and you know I want to marry you more than anything else in the world. But it would not help us for me to tell her so, though she does profess to like the looks of me. She likes the looks of her money better." "What's that to do with it?" "She'd want to know if I expected her to keep us." "You could say 'No.'" "Then she'd want to know if I could keep you." "You could say 'Yes.'" "But I can't keep you, Lucy. I can't keep myself, not yet, though I have hopes that my luck is changing," he spoke mysteriously. "Shall we never be married?" she asked wearily, leaning her head upon his shoulder. "We must wait a little longer." "It's always wait, wait, wait, Joel." "Well, you see, you shouldn't have fallen in love with such a poverty-stricken creature. But I thank God--whenever I thank Him at all--that you did. You're the only soul that has ever cared for me, Lucy. My mother blew the thought of me away as though I had been dust; and old Mally Ray, honest heart, doesn't know the meaning of real love. I don't think her religion approves of the word. Look up, Lucy, and let me see you smile--it's a garden of roses to me, that smile of yours." She did look up, but to ask in a cold voice: "How much money have you, Joel?" "Only a penny piece, but, like the widow's curse, it's going to multiply." "Really?" "You shall see. Some fine morning I'll come riding up to Greystones and carry you off to be lady of Forest Hall."