The match, while in every respect a brilliant one and beyond what they might have hoped for Margery, found her mother in some doubt. She suspected that fifteen years was too great a difference of age; and she professed uncertainty concerning the past life of a bachelor of thirty-five. She did not know anything against Bullstone, or his parents before him; she could not name the quality of her suspicions, yet she questioned Margery very closely and warned her of the step that she designed. But no permanent cloud appeared and Jacob conducted himself in a manner to disarm Mrs. Huxam; for his views of matrimony satisfied her and he proposed a settlement that could only be regarded as generous. In this matter, however, Barlow Huxam was not behind his future son-in-law. Twice on Sundays the lover brought Margery to her family, and twice he worshipped with them at their tabernacle. His behaviour was agreeable to Mrs. Huxam and her doubts finally dwindled. To-day, while Margery and Jacob walked side by side towards Red House, nestling under a shoulder of the hill behind the pine woods, the girl's parents and her brother were already upon their way, tramping through shady lanes upward through the valley to Shipley Bridge. "I'd best change into a petticoat before they come," said Margery. "Mother little likes my breeches, and thanks God I shan't wear 'em much longer." "I feel the same," said the man. "You know I'm at you to doff them once for all." "I love 'em," she declared. "I'll miss them cruel. You courted me while I was in 'em, and I shall put them on now and again--for luck. Petticoats slow your going and be tame after breeches." "'T was never heard that man and wife both wore 'em," he said. They passed through the woods with the puppies galloping round about, and then they came to the stone-built home of the Bullstones--a granite house under red tiles, which covered the upper storey of the walls also. It basked under the hot sun in a hollow notch of Black Tor, while the river ran at its feet and a grass lawn spread before the windows. Above, on the hillside, were scooped terraces where grew cabbage and turnip, and beyond sprang the trees to the hill crest westerly. Laurel and rhododendron made the slope snug; the kennels extended behind the house, while Bullstone's property spread to the other side of the river also and there an acre or two had been cleared, where potatoes grew in the rich alluvial. Fowls and ducks flourished at stream side and the link between Red House and the outlying cultivation was a bridge of pine logs thrown across Auna, where her banks rose high. Everything about the place was neat, trim and stern. The hedges were clipt, the ground clean; for Jacob Bullstone's mother was an old-fashioned woman and had lived with a husband inspired by the same ideas.