But it was on a shawl for Lucy that Jack spent his first week's earnings at Co-op Mill, a dainty, modest shawl of softest fleece, a shawl, Jack declared, you could draw through a finger ring, and perhaps one might if the finger were one of Jack's. The rosy-cheeked, brown-eyed lasses of the little farms and homesteads, and the more forward wenches of the valley mills wasted their becks and nods and wreathed smiles on Jack. He took them all as a matter of course; but a look from Lucy's soft warm eyes, from which the pathetic wistfulness of long suffering had not yet worn away, would set Jack "all of a dither." It was for Lucy, when the season came, that he ransacked the hill sides for the peeping snowdrop, and the hedge-bottoms for the shy primrose; for Lucy that he bore home the nodding blue-bells and the blushing fox-glove, or the rare wild rose; for Lucy that he searched the brambles for the luscious blackberry, and bent his back o'er the purple heather for the nestling bilberry; for Lucy that he brought the thrilling thrush; for Lucy that he nearly broke his neck down the steps of the church belfry the day he secured the wild young jackdaw; and for Lucy that he weaned the perverse bird of its natural addition to choleric speech and general bad language. In Jack's eyes Lucy was fair and beautiful as any angel--and indeed her pale face was very sweet to look upon--and for him Lucy's lightest word--nay, such is the divination of affection--Lucy's unspoken thought was as law. And who so surely as Jack could rouse Lucy from the sad reveries into which her thoughts would sometimes stray, and bring back to her lips the pleasant smile and the gentle repartee that had neither sting nor lash? Who was it but Jack that nearly killed the barman at the _Rose and Crown_ because he soiled his lips with an unseemly jest involving both Tom and Lucy; who but Jack that, however urgent his business errands might be, never passed Ben's cottage without solicitous enquiry as to Lucy's health, and what sort of a night she had had, and how she had felt that day; and for whom but Lucy did Jack forswear cakes and ale?