"I say, you know, aren't you carrying this on a bit too hard?" he half-whispered. "Isn't it time you gave way just a little bit? You see how nice and gentle I am with you, dear. Some fellows would be rough and lay hold of you, but I'm not that sort. I like to be tender and kind with a girl. Just because one's big and strong, one don't need to be a regular brute. I say, come now, that's enough. Let's look at your pretty face. Take off your sun-bonnet. It's a darned ugly one, and I'll go over to Derby some night and buy you the prettiest that there is in the shops. I will, 'pon my soul! There's no humbug about me, my dear. Why, you've made this old wilderness look quite cheerful, and if it hadn't been for knowing that you lived down there by the river, I don't believe I should have stopped it out. I should have just written off to the governor and said, `I'm coming back to London.' I say, wouldn't you like to go up to London, my dear? I'll take you and pay up like a man.--I mean it." Dinah's heart gave a great leap, for not fifty yards farther on there was the narrow natural gateway in the side of the hill, leading right into the deep, zigzag rift which clave the mountain from the top far down into the bowels of the earth, and spread in secondary maze-like chasms farther and farther in here through the limestone, where the dirty grey lead ore was found in company with masses of crystalline growth glittering with galena. Here, too, was the wondrous conglomerate of lily encrinite, once animated flowers of stone, forming the mountain masses of Derbyshire marble, where a calm sea once spread its deep waters in the days when the earth was young. Here were the beds and veins of the transparent violet spar, locally known as the "Blue John," which glistened here and there in the natural caves, side by side with stalactite and stalagmite, wherever water filtered through the strata, and came out charged with the lime which had gone on cementing spar and shell together into solid blocks. A weird, strange place to any one save the lovers of the strange, and then only explored in company by the light of chemical and wick. A place generally shunned, and only to be sought or chosen as a sanctuary by one who was pursued. But circumstances alter cases, and matters happen strangely and influence our lives in unexpected ways.