“Don’t be too sure of that, Jasper,” she replied, with an arch smile, thinking to aid him in his project. “It is so long since I have ridden out with you, that I may wish to make a day of it. Come, let us start.” And she gave her jennet its head, and cantered lightly away over the green, her husband following at a trot of his powerful hunter; and in a few minutes they were both hidden from the eyes of the servants, among the clumps of forest-trees and the dense thickets of the chase. At something more than three miles’ distance from Widecomb House, to the westward, there is a pass in the hills, where a bridle-road crosses the channel of the large brook, which I have named so often, and which, at a point far lower down, was the scene of Jasper’s ill-omened introduction to Theresa Allan. This bridle-road, leading from the sparse settlements on Dartmoor to the nearest point of the seacoast, was a rough, dangerous track, little frequented except by the smugglers and poachers of that region, and lay for the most part considerably below the level of the surrounding country, between wooded hills, or walk of dark gray rock. The point at which it crosses the stream is singularly wild and romantic, for the road and the river both are walled by sheer precipices of gray, shattered, limestone rock, nearly two hundred feet in height, perfectly barren, bare, and treeless, except on the summits, which are covered with heather and low, stunted shrubbery. The river itself, immediately above the ford, by which the road passes it, descends by a flight of rocky steps, or irregular shelvy rapids, above a hundred feet within three times as many yards, and then spreads out into a broad, open pool, where its waters, not ordinarily above three feet deep, glance rapidly, but still and unbroken, over a level pavement of smooth stone, almost as slippery as ice. Scarce twenty yards below this, there is an abrupt pitch of sixty feet in perpendicular height, over which the river rushes at all times in a loud foaming waterfall, but after storms among the hills, in a tremendous roaring cataract. The ford is never a safe one, owing to the insecure foothold afforded by the slippery limestone, but when the river is in flood, no one in his senses would dream of crossing it. Yet it was by this road that Jasper had persuaded his young wife that they could alone hope to escape with any chance of safety, and to this point he was leading her. And she, though she knew the pass, and all its perils, resolute to accompany him through life, and, if need should be, to death itself, rode onward with him, cheerful and apparently fearless.