Mr.
Tregenza said of them that they always wanted and expected God to do more
than His share. But he married Joan Chirgwin, nevertheless; and now he saw
her again, fair, trustful, light-hearted, in his daughter. The girl indeed
had more of her mother in her than Gray Michael liked. She was
superstitious, not after the manner of the Tregenzas, but in a direction
that must have brought her father's loudest thunders upon her head if the
matter had come to his ears. She loved the old stories of the saints and
spirits, she gloried secretly in the splendid wealth of folklore and
tradition her mother's people and those like them possessed at command. Her
dead parent had whispered and sung these matters into Joan's baby ears
until her father stopped it. She remembered how black he looked when she
lisped about the piskeys; and though to-day she half believed in demon and
fairy, goblin and giant, and quite believed in the saints and their
miracles, she kept this side of her intelligence close locked when at home,
and only nodded very gravely when her father roared against the blighting
credulity of men's minds and the follies for which fishers and miners, and
indeed the bulk of the human family in Cornwall, must some day burn.
People outside the fold said that the Luke Gospelers killed Tregenza's
first wife. She, of course, accepted her husband's convictions, but it had
never been in her tender heart to catch the true Luke Gospel spirit.
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