In spring the tanglewood valley was a nursery of birds. Wrens, thrushes, chiffchaffs, greenfinches and chaffinches built their nests in scented thickets of hawthorn and may; blue and oxeye tits kept house in holes in the apple and oak trees. These added their songs to that of the brook. In spring the bridal woods about Bosula rippled and thrilled with liquid and debonair melody. But it was the owls that were the feature of the spot. Winter or summer they sat on their boughs and hooted to each other across the valley, waking the woods with startling and eerie screams. “To-whoo, wha-aa, who-hoo!” they would go, amber eyes burning, and then launch themselves heavily from their perches and beat, gray and ghostly, across the moon. “Whoo, wha-hoo!” Young lovers straying up the valley were apt to clasp each other the tighter and whisper of men murdered and evil hauntings when they heard the owls, but the first Penhale in his day, camped with his ass in the crook of the stream, took their banshee salutes as a good omen. He lay on his back in the leaves listening to them and wondering at their number. “Bos hula enweer ew’n teller na,” said he in Cornish, as he rolled over to sleep. “Truly this is the owls’ house.” CHAPTER IV When John Penhale carried the gypsy girl into Bosula, he thought she would be off again in a fortnight or a month at most. On the contrary she curled up as snug as a dormouse, apparently prepared to stay forever. At first she followed him wherever he went about the farm, but after a week she gave that up and remained at Bosula absorbed in the preparation of food. The number of really satisfying meals the girl Teresa had had in her time could be counted on her fingers and toes, almost. Life had been maintained by a crust here and a bone there. She was only half gypsy; her mother had been an itinerant herbalist, her father a Basque bear-leader, and she was born at Blyth Fair. Her twenty-two years had been spent on the highways, singing and dancing from tavern to tavern, harried by the law on one side and hunger on the other. She had no love for the Open Road; her feet were sore from trudging it and she knew it led nowhere but to starvation; her mother had died in a ditch and her father had been hanged. For years she had been waiting a chance to get out of the dust, and when John came along, knocked out the tumbler and jerked her a florin she saw that possible chance.