He chuckled as he painted, one eye on the gleaming mystery of the Downs. "Been opening my letters, you burglar?" "The letter's to me." This time he turned, saw her face, and steadied. She offered him the envelope. He glanced at the address. "Yes, it's to you all right. Funny they didn't write to me." "Won't you read it, Ned?" she said gently. He skimmed the contents and winced. "That's all right, Anne," he said, handing it back to her, and patting her hand. "The old man's been as good as his word--and better, by the amount of Income Tax." "Such a way to do it and all," said Anne censoriously. He pinched her arm. "Perhaps it's for the best," he said. "And anyway, it doesn't much matter." If Edward Caspar was by no means sure of himself, he was sure beyond question of the woman life had given him. She lifted her face to his, and it was beautiful. "Ned," she said; and he kissed her. BOOK II THE TWO BROTHERS CHAPTER VIII BEACHBOURNE The Domesday Book tells us that King Edward the Confessor held the Manor of Burne, and gave the endowment of the Church of St. Michael to the Abbey of Fecamp, along with the Lordships of Steyning and Rye and Winchelsea and other jewels from the crown of Sussex; as all who have read Mr. Dudgeon's scholarly history of Beachbourne will recall. Harold cancelled the grant, with the result, so legend has it, that William the Norman landed at Pevensey just across the way to enforce restitution. In those days the parish of Burne covered like a blanket the western promontory of the great Bay. At each of the four corners of the blanket, holding it down as it were, was a rude hamlet. On the bourne itself a few hovels clustered round the wooden church upon the Kneb; in Coombe-in-the-Cliff, carved out of the flank of Beau-nez, was Holy Well, haunted by pilgrims from the Continent; on the sea-front there was the Wish, beneath which of old a Roman dock had been; and further east was Sea-gate with its fishing-station and the earth-work which guarded the entrance to the Bay whose waters swept inland over what are now the Levels to Ratton and Horsey and the borders of Hailsham. In the reign of Henry II the Norman church, much as we know it to-day, succeeded the crazy wooden building in which our Saxon forefathers heard the Word of the Promise first brought to Sussex by Bishop Wilfrith, who starting from the North, dared the perils of the Forest, and somehow fought his way through brake and marsh and thicket, among wild beasts and wilder men, to the ancient Roman settlement at Chichester; thence to spread the news all along the high bleak coast-line on which at river-mouths and lagoon-like estuaries the Saxon adventurers had gained a footing.