As the year slid through the fogs into the spring, he persuaded Joanna to come with him on his rambles on the Marsh.  He was astonished to find how little she knew of her own country, of that dim flat land which was once under the sea.  She knew it only as the hunting ground of her importance.  It was at Yokes Court that she bought her roots, and from Becket’s House her looker had come; Lydd and Rye and Romney were only market-towns—­you did best in cattle at Rye, but the other two were proper for sheep; Old Honeychild was just a farm where she had bought some good spades and dibbles at an auction; at Misleham they had once had foot-and-mouth disease—­she had gone to Picknye Bush for the character of Milly Pump, her chicken-girl....

He told her of the smugglers and owlers who had used the Woolpack as their headquarters long ago, riding by moonlight to the cross-roads, with their mouths full of slang—­cant talk of “mackerel” and “fencing” and “hornies” and “Oliver’s glim.”

“Well, if they talked worse there then than they talk now, they must have talked very bad indeed,” was all Joanna found to say.

He told her of the old monks of Canterbury who had covered the Marsh with the altars of Thomas a Becket.

“We got shut of ’em all on the fifth of November,” said Joanna, “as we sing around here on bonfire nights—­and ’A halfpenny loaf to feed the Pope, a penn’orth of cheese to choke him,’ as we say.”

All the same he enjoyed the expeditions that they had together in her trap, driving out on some windy-skied March day, to fill the hours snatched from her activities at Ansdore and his muddlings at North Farthing, with all the sea-green sunny breadth of Walland, and still more divinely with Walland’s secret places—­the shelter of tall reeds by the Yokes Sewer, or of a thorn thicket making a tent of white blossom and spindled shadows in the midst of the open land.

Sometimes they crossed the Rhee Wall on to Romney Marsh, and he showed her the great church at Ivychurch, which could have swallowed up in its nave the two small farms that make the village.  He took her into the church at New Romney and showed her the marks of the Great Flood, discolouring the pillars for four feet from the ground.

“Doesn’t it thrill you?—­Doesn’t it excite you?” he teased her, as they stood together in the nave, the church smelling faintly of hearthstones.

“How long ago did it happen?”

“In the year of our Lord twelve hundred and eighty seven the Kentish river changed his mouth, and after swilling out Romney Sands and drowning all the marsh from Honeychild to the Wicks, did make himself a new mouth in Rye Bay, with which mouth he swallowed the fifty taverns and twelve churches of Broomhill, and—­”

“Oh, have done talking that silly way—­it’s like the Bible, only there’s no good in it.”

Her red mouth was close to his in the shadows of the church—­he kissed it....