Chapter 6

Between six and seven o'clock in the evening of the same day a young
man descended the hills into the valley of the Exe, at a point about
midway between Silverthorn and the residence of Margery's
grandmother, four miles to the east.

He was a thoroughbred son of the country, as far removed from what is
known as the provincial, as the latter is from the out-and-out
gentleman of culture. His trousers and waistcoat were of fustian,
almost white, but he wore a jacket of old-fashioned blue West-of-
England cloth, so well preserved that evidently the article was
relegated to a box whenever its owner engaged in such active
occupations as he usually pursued. His complexion was fair, almost
florid, and he had scarcely any beard.

A novel attraction about this young man, which a glancing stranger
would know nothing of, was a rare and curious freshness of atmosphere
that appertained to him, to his clothes, to all his belongings, even
to the room in which he had been sitting. It might almost have been
said that by adding him and his implements to an over-crowded
apartment you made it healthful. This resulted from his trade. He
was a lime-burner; he handled lime daily; and in return the lime
rendered him an incarnation of salubrity. His hair was dry, fair,
and frizzled, the latter possibly by the operation of the same
caustic agent. He carried as a walking-stick a green sapling, whose
growth had been contorted to a corkscrew pattern by a twining
honeysuckle.

As he descended to the level ground of the water-meadows he cast his
glance westward, with a frequency that revealed him to be in search
of some object in the distance. It was rather difficult to do this,
the low sunlight dazzling his eyes by glancing from the river away
there, and from the 'carriers' (as they were called) in his path--
narrow artificial brooks for conducting the water over the grass.
His course was something of a zigzag from the necessity of finding
points in these carriers convenient for jumping. Thus peering and
leaping and winding, he drew near the Exe, the central river of the
miles-long mead.

A moving spot became visible to him in the direction of his scrutiny,
mixed up with the rays of the same river. The spot got nearer, and
revealed itself to be a slight thing of pink cotton and shepherd's
plaid, which pursued a path on the brink of the stream. The young
man so shaped his trackless course as to impinge on the path a little
ahead of this coloured form, and when he drew near her he smiled and
reddened. The girl smiled back to him; but her smile had not the
life in it that the young man's had shown.

'My dear Margery--here I am!' he said gladly in an undertone, as with
a last leap he crossed the last