"A bootless business," he answered. "After all, there's no higher thought for living man than his duty to his neighbour; and if you do that, you'll mostly find you're doing your duty to yourself. God forbid I should quarrel with your mother; but I won't pretend, Margery; I don't go all the way with her and I'm glad of it." The girl did not reply and he talked of the Moor. "The 'old men' are gone," he said, "and be sure they were men and women as good as we, if not so clever. They lived hard for certain, but I dare say they had their bit of fun, if it was only fighting; and as for goodness and hope of salvation, who are we, with all our comforts and inventions, to deny goodness to them, or the eternal reward of goodness? Why in the name of charity must nine out of every ten humans that come into the world be doomed to hell? What did the Lord die for, Margery, if all the doubtful characters are to be damned?" "Leave it," she said. "I feel same as you; but I haven't thought about such fearful things and more have you; but mother and father have. You must give them best in that matter, please, Jacob." She was pained and they fell silent for a while. The man resolved to enlarge her ideas presently, and felt a smoulder of indignation that a creed so ugly to him should have seared the mind of an innocent and happy girl. They still held north over wild lands with the heights rolling about them; then they reached the ancient Abbot's Way, running east and west, and met Auna's stream near Huntingdon Cross, a granite memorial from olden time. Less than five feet high it stood above the heath. "Here's the Forest Boundary," said Jacob, "and now we'll get to the Warren House yonder, rest a bit and start for home.' "I always feel sorry to turn at the end of a great day," she answered, "and this is the greatest day, but one, that ever I have lived." He kissed her. "And that one was the day you asked me to marry you, Jacob." "Don't I know it?" The Warren House stood before them under a ragged sycamore. It was almost the loneliest inhabited dwelling in Devon, and its squat, white face peered out upon the wilderness from under a black, tar-pitched roof. The rabbit warrens spread on either hand and the dwelling lay in the protection of a tumulus that piled up to the northward. "I love this forgotten place," declared Bullstone. "In some moods--not now, but once when I was younger and less content than now--I've thought it would be a very good place to live, beyond the fret and cark of life." But Margery shivered. "I'd have to be broke in mind and body and not wishful to live at all, before I'd live here," she said. Indeed the spot was somewhat melancholy and calculated to chill a cheerful spirit. Death seemed to have made this place a home. Evidences of mortality stared round about. In one corner of the little yard was a heap of bones, and suspended from a low bough of the sycamore, there hung a flayed horse by a hook.