"Along of a wicked wife," he answered shortly. "No tale for your nice ears, yet a common enough thing for that matter. We're jealous folk, or was. He had a wife, and she had a lover, and Michael Bullstone caught them together and slew the pair of them. Then he gave himself up; but women were a bit lower in male value then than they are now, I reckon. The case was plain, but the jury--married men, no doubt--brought in Michael Bullstone not guilty. It put the fear of God into a good few wives I reckon. But the strange part of the tale is to tell. He was forty when he killed them---forty and a childless man. But at fifty he married one of the Elvins, of the same family that are at Owley Farm now. Jemima Elvin he married, and he had three sons and one daughter by her. People said it was like the tale of Job--only in that case the Devil took everything from the man but his wife; and in Michael Bullstone's case, his bad wife was the only thing he lost, and that by his own act." "'Tis beyond belief to me," said Margery, "that a woman can ever roam from the man she loves." "Such good-for-noughts don't know the meaning of love," he answered; "and you'll find such dregs and trash of women generally end in the gutter, where they belong." "Must be an awful thing if love dies," she said. "Love doesn't die," he answered with ingenuous conviction. "The woman that can look on her husband with a cold heart never loved him. True love is what you and I know--built for a lifetime." "At first I was so proud, when you told me you loved me, that I couldn't feel anything else but the pride. It seemed too wonderful a thing to have happened to such an everyday girl as me. But when it came home, then the secret love I'd hid for you burst out in a sort of triumphant worship, till I felt, even if I died that instant minute, I'd have had more happiness than any woman ever deserved." He laughed at that. "You're the old-fashioned sort, I reckon--content for man to be master," he replied. "Women don't think so much like that now seemingly. They want to run their own lives a bit more and be free; but they'll soon tire of that caper and find security is better than adventures. You'll be the crown of my house and my mother's right hand so long as she's spared; and I'll do the man's work and stand between you and every wind that blows if I can." "And well I know it," she said. At Bullstone, the farmhouse stood back from the lane at the summit of a steep hill, and everything was well ordered. The whitewashed front of the house shone in bright sunlight, only broken by the open windows, and a great climbing shrub of buddleia, whose purple tassels fell over the porch. The roof was of Delabole slate, and behind the farm, a rising copse straggled up to frontier ridges of Ugborough Beacon. Round about the farmyard stood buildings, mostly under corrugated iron, that glittered silver bright, and in the porch sat an old man shelling peas.