“What do you want with two beds?” he asked with a tinge of scorn as well as of pity in his frank amusement. “My missus and I have only had one bed these forty years.” Here he laughed so gaily that he could not have embarrassed the very devil of puritanism, and turning to his man he called forth a deep bass laughter and from his wife a peal that shook her arms so that she raised them to the sides of the porch for better support; the children also turned their laughter our way. “But perhaps one of you kicks in his sleep?... We don’t.... Come inside. I dare say you are tired.... Good-night, John. Now, children, up with you.” I think they were the most excellent pair of man and woman I ever saw. Both were of a splendid physical type, she the more energetic, black-haired, black-eyed, plump and tall and straight; he the more enduring, fair-haired and bearded, blue-eyed, hardly her equal in height, certainly not in words. In forty years neither had overpowered the other. They had not even agreed to take separate paths, but like two school-boys, new friends, they could afford to contend together in opinions without fear of damage or of lazy truce. He had ploughed and sowed and reaped: she had borne him seven children, had baked and churned and stitched. They had loved sweet things together, and, with curses at times, their children and the land. Physical strength and purity--that were in them the whole of morality--seemed to have given them that equality with the conditions of life which philosophy has done nothing but talk about. They of all men and women had perhaps jarred least upon the music of the spheres. They had the right and power to live, and the end was laughter. In all those years they had been separated but once. Until four years ago she had not been out of Cornwall except to bury her mother, who had suddenly died in London. Two hundred pounds fell to her share on that death and the money arrived one morning after the harvest thanksgiving. For a week she continued to go about her work in the old way save that she sent rather hurriedly for a daughter who had just left her place as cook in Exeter. At the end of the week, having stored the apples and shown her daughter how to use the separator, she walked in to Penzance in her best clothes but without even a handbag; her husband was out with his gun. By the next day she was at Liverpool. She sent off a picture postcard, with a little note written by the shopkeeper, saying that she would be back by Christmas, and telling her husband to sell the old bull. Then she sailed for New York. She saw Niagara; she visited her nephew, John Davy, at Cincinnati; she spent two weeks in railway travelling west and south, and saw the Indians. Four days before Christmas she was back in the rickyard, driving before her a young bull and carrying in her hand a bunch of maize. “Well, Ann, you’re back before your time,” said her husband, after praising the beast.