If he only knew! She felt that even had
change darkened his affection for her, yet, most surely, the thought of the
baby must tempt him back again. Thus, with sustained bravery and ignorance,
she left her hand in Nature's, and her faith, rising gloriously above the
doubt of the time, trusted that majestic heathen goddess as a little child
trusts its mother.
Fate played another prank upon her not long afterward and thrust into her
hands a possible means of access to John Barron. A favorite resort of
Joan's was the brook which ran down the valley beneath Drift and Sancreed.
The little stream wound through a fair coomb between orchards, meadows,
wastes of fern and heather. At this season of the year the valley was very
lonely, and a certain spot beside the stream often tempted Joan by reason
of its comfort and its peace. From here, sitting on a granite bowlder
clothed in soft green mosses and having a shape into which human limbs
might fit easily, the girl could see much that was fair. The meadows were
all sprinkled with the silver-mauve of cuckoo-flowers--Shakespeare's
"lady's smock"; the hills sloped upward under oaken saplings as yet too
young for the stripping; the valley stretched winding landward beneath
Sancreed. Above and far away stretched the Cornish moors dotted with man's
mining enterprises, chiefly deserted. Ding-Dong raised its gaunt engine
stack and, distant though it was, Joan's sharp eyes could see the rusty arm
of iron stretching forth from the brickwork, motionless, not worth the
removing.
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