"Very often not, till too late." "Then it's a bit of added fortune to fall in love with a right good man," she said. "Safest no doubt. But I wasn't quite like you. I did take into account your goodness; and I wouldn't have let myself love you, as I do love you, if you hadn't been better than gold. If I'd found you were light and didn't take life seriously, I should still have been interested in you and anxious for your future and wishful to advance it; but I shouldn't have fallen in love with you, Margery." "You fright me when you say that," she answered, "because we all know lovers can't see straight; and now I shall fear you'll find me not half so good as you think." "There--there; now you're fishing for praise! You know yourself very well; and if you hadn't been my sort, you wouldn't have fallen in love with me. And don't you be fearing I'm too serious and like to bore you. I love life and the good things of life, though work's the best of them and wears best. But we won't miss the junkettings and revels now and then; though with your upbringing, I shouldn't wonder if you proved a thought more stiff-starched than I, for all my age and experience." They chatted very joyously together and then a good thing happened, for in the shaking moss, where a spring was born and bubbled up out of the granite, Jacob marked a piece of bog heather, white as snow, and though he had to wade half up his leggings to get it, he did not hesitate. "There!" he said, "there's your white heather, and now you've got your luck from me and none else." "I'll treasure it up for ever and ever," she said. "I've got my luck from you--that's a true word in the sight of God; and I hope a time is coming when you'll say you've got your luck from me." "Luck's a poor word," he answered. "I've got my new life from you, Margery. All that's coming means you--all." "Who laughed at me and said I was talking poetry on Ugborough?" she asked, with the evening light on her dark hair and in her eyes. Jacob put his arm round her. "What I say isn't poetry--unless God's truth be poetry," he answered. So they came home together beside the river. CHAPTER III THE RESCUE Two persons, ignorant of each other's presence, sat nigh the river on a windy day in October. The latter rains had fallen, the springs were unsealed. Each rillet was swollen to a gushing stream and the rivers ran in torrents. North and south they shouted from their drowned fountains and hurried a mighty volume of cherry red and spumy water back again to the Channel and the Severn Sea, whence it had come.