“But there wouldn’t be nothin’ for me to do,” said Reuben.

“Why, iss there would—­oceans,” returned Joan.  “Laws!  I knaws clocks by scores as hasn’t gone for twenty year and more.  Us has got two ourselves, that wan won’t strike and t’ other you can’t make tick.”

Reuben smiled:  then, growing more serious, he said, “But do you know, Joan, that yours isn’t the first head it’s entered into about going down home with you?  I’ve had a mind toward it myself many times of late.”

“Why, then, do come to wance,” said Joan excitedly; “for so long as they leaves me the house there’ll be a home with me and Uncle Zebedee, and I’ll go bail for the welcome you’ll get gived ’ee there.”

Reuben was silent, and Joan, attributing this to some hesitation over the plan, threw further weight into her argument by saying, “There’s the chapel too, Reuben.  Only to think o’ the sight o’ good you could do praichin’ to ’em and that! for, though it didn’t seem to make no odds before, I reckons there’s not a few that wants, like me, to be told o’ some place where they treats folks better than they does down here below.”

“Joan,” said Reuben after a pause, speaking out of his own thoughts and paying no heed to the words she had been saying, “you know all about Eve and me, don’t you?”

Joan nodded her head.

“How I’ve felt about her, so that I believe the hold she’s got on me no one on earth will ever push her off from.”

“Awh, poor sawl!” sighed Joan compassionately:  “I’ve often had a feelin’ for what you’d to bear, and for this reason too—­that I knaws myself what ‘tis to be ousted from the heart you’m cravin’ to call yer own.”

“Why, yes, of course,” said Reuben briskly:  “you were set down for Adam once, weren’t you?”

“Awh, and there’s they to Polperro—­mother amongst ’em, too—­who’ll tell ’ee now that if Eve had never shawed her face inside the place Adam ’ud ha’ had me, after all.  But there! all that’s past and gone long ago.”

There was another pause, which Reuben broke by saying suddenly, “Joan, should you take it very out of place if I was to ask you whether after a bit you could marry me?  I dare say now such a thought never entered your head before.”

“Well, iss it has,” said Joan; ‘and o’ late, ever since that blessed dear spoke they words he did, I’ve often fell to wonderin’ if so be ’t ‘ud ever come to pass.  Not, mind, that I should ha’ bin put out if ’t had so happened that you’d never axed me, like, but still I thought sometimes as how you might, and then agen I says, ’Why should he, though?’”

“There’s many a reason why I should ask you, Joan,” said Reuben, smiling at her unconscious frankness, “though very few why you should consent to take a man whose love another woman has flung away.”

“Awh, so far as that goes, the both of us is takin’ what’s another’s orts, you knaw,” smiled Joan.