It consisted of a great gateway with a roof vaulted, ribbed and bossed, and a lesser entrance that stood to the north of the first. They pierced the mass and bore above them a chamber, of which only the floor and ruined walls remained. It was reached by a stair, where stone steps wound in the thickness of the wall and opened on to the crown of the ruin fifty feet above. The space aloft was hung with polypody and spleenwort in the chinks of its crumbling mortar, and ivy knots seemed to hold the mass together. A whitethorn had found foothold and rose above the central block of stone. Through a ruined aperture facing east, one might see the orchard sloping to the valley bottom and Cornworthy’s scattered dwellings, ascending on the farther hill. The picture, set in the grey granite frame of the priory window, revealed thatched houses grouped closely, with land sweeping upwards on either side, so that the hamlet lay in a dingle between the breasts of the red earth. The land climbed on beyond the village and threw a hogged back across the sky. Here were broad fallows and hedgerows where the leafless elms broke the line with their grey skeletons. To this exalted but secret place, Medora and Kellock were come. He had indeed been there some time when she arrived. “If you sit here,” he said, “you’re out of the wind.” “We’re safe now,” she answered. “And ’twas like you to put yourself about and tramp all this way. But I’ve got to be terrible careful, Jordan, for if my husband thought I’d any friends working for me and thinking for me, I don’t know what awful thing he’d do against me. Nuns used to live here in past ages,” she continued. “Oh, my God! I wish I’d been one of them. Then I should have spent my days in peace and be at rest now.” “Sit down and let’s use our time as best we can,” he advised. “Time—time—I want for time to end. For two pins I’d jump out of that window and end all time so far as I’m concerned.” “You mustn’t talk or think like that, or else I shall fear I can’t be any use. I tell you, before God, that my life’s all centred in you and your troubles now. I shan’t have no peace till you have peace.” “I’ll live for you then; and that’s about all I want to live for any longer,” declared Medora. She felt in a theatrical mood and Ned’s recent confession enabled her to speak with a great oncoming of warmth and emotion. Her perception had fastened upon it from the first and measured its value. And now in the Priory ruin, she made the most of the matter. She had worked it up and found it a tower of strength. “I know what happened,” she said. “You hid it, Jordan, like the man you are; but he told me how he knocked you into the water—cruel devil.” “I’m sorry he told you.—I asked him not to.” “He wanted me to see what he could do, and would do again, and will do again. He properly hates me now, and I shall soon be going in fear of my life—I know that well enough. Not that I care much for my life; but it’s awful to live with a tiger.”