. Only one thing I resolved upon, that come when he would
he should not see Annie. And to do my sister justice, she had no desire
to see him.

However, I am too easy, there is no doubt of that, being very quick to
forgive a man, and very slow to suspect, unless he hath once lied to
me. Moreover, as to Annie, it had always seemed to me (much against my
wishes) that some shrewd love of a waiting sort was between her and Tom
Faggus: and though Tom had made his fortune now, and everybody
respected him, of course he was not to be compared, in that point of
respectability, with those people who hanged the robbers when fortune
turned against them.

So young Squire Marwood came again, as though I had never smitten
him, and spoke of it in as light a way as if we were still at school
together. It was not in my nature, of course, to keep any anger against
him; and I knew what a condescension it was for him to visit us. And
it is a very grievous thing, which touches small landowners, to see an
ancient family day by day decaying: and when we heard that Ley Barton
itself, and all the Manor of Lynton were under a heavy mortgage debt to
John Lovering of Weare-Gifford, there was not much, in our little way,
that we would not gladly do or suffer for the benefit of De Whichehalse.

Meanwhile the work of the farm was toward, and every day gave us
more ado to dispose of what itself was doing. For after the long dry
skeltering wind of March and part of April, there had been a fortnight
of soft wet; and when the sun came forth again, hill and valley, wood
and meadow, could not make enough of him. Many a spring have I seen
since then, but never yet two springs alike, and never one so beautiful.
Or was it that my love came forth and touched the world with beauty?

[Illustration: 182.jpg Spring was in our valley]

The spring was in our valley now; creeping first for shelter shyly in
the pause of the blustering wind. There the lambs came bleating to her,
and the orchis lifted up, and the thin dead leaves of clover lay for the
new ones to spring through. There the stiffest things that sleep, the
stubby oak, and the saplin'd beech, dropped their brown defiance to her,
and prepared for a soft reply.

While her over-eager children (who had started forth to meet her,
through the frost and shower of sleet), catkin'd hazel, gold-gloved
withy, youthful elder, and old woodbine, with all the tribe of good
hedge-climbers (who must hasten while haste t