It is now two years and more since, on an August day, I wound up my line by Dunford Bridge, and sauntered towards the Light Horseman Inn, two gunshots up the road.  The time was four o’clock, or thereabouts, and a young couple sat on a bench by the inn-door, drinking cocoa out of one cup.  Above their heads and along the house-front a vine-tree straggled, but its foliage was too thin to afford a speck of shade as they sat there in the eye of the westering sun.  The man (aged about one-and-twenty) wore the uncomfortable Sunday-best of a mechanic, with a shrivelled, but still enormous, bunch of Sweet-William in his buttonhole.  The girl was dressed in a bright green gown and a white bonnet.  Both were flushed and perspiring, and I still think they must have ordered hot cocoa in haste, and were repenting it at leisure.  They lifted their eyes and blushed with a yet warmer red as I passed into the porch.

Two men were seated in the cool tap-room, each with a pasty and a mug of beer.  A composition of sweat and coal-dust had caked their faces, and so deftly smoothed all distinction out of their features that it seemed at the moment natural and proper to take them for twins.  Perhaps this was an error:  perhaps, too, their appearance of extreme age was produced by the dark grey dust that overlaid so much of them as showed above the table.  As twins, however, I remember them, and cannot shake off the impression that they had remained twins for an unusual number of years.

One addressed me.  “Parties outside pretty comfortable?” he asked.

“They were drinking out of the same cup,” I answered.

He nodded.  “Made man and wife this mornin’.  I don’t fairly know what’s best to do.  Lord knows I wouldn’ hurry their soft looks and dilly-dallyin’; but did ’ee notice how much beverage was left in the cup?”

“They was mated at Tregarrick, half-after-nine this mornin’,” observed the other twin, pulling out a great watch, “and we brought ’em down here in a truck for their honeymoon.  The agreement was for an afternoon in the woods; but by crum! sir, they’ve sat there and held one another’s hand for up’ards of an hour after the stated time to start.  And we ha’nt the heart to tell ’em so.”

He walked across to the window and peered over the blind.

“There’s a mort of grounds in the cocoa that’s sold here,” he went on, after a look, “and ’tisn’t the sort that does the stomach good, neither.  For their own sakes, I’ll give the word to start, and chance their thankin’ me some day later when they learn what things be made of.”

The other twin arose, shook the crumbs off his trousers, and stretched himself.  I guessed now that this newly-married pair had delayed traffic at the Dunford terminus of the Cuckoo Valley Railway for almost an hour and a half; and I determined to travel into Tregarrick by the same train.

So we strolled out of the inn towards the line, the lovers following, arm-in-arm, some fifty paces behind.