She held up a pretty brown hand, and shook her head at the man.
"Christopher," she said, "supposing that your bridge had broken, and I had tumbled in?"
"I should have saved you, without doubt--a delicious experience."
"For you. What a subject for a romance: you, the last of your line; I, the last of mine, being swept to death by old Teign! And my farm would be desolate, and your woods and hills and ancestral hall, all bundled wretchedly into Chancery, or some such horrid place."
"On the contrary, I save you; I rescue you at great personal peril, and we join hands and lands, and live happily ever afterwards."
"There's a heron! You frightened him with your folly."
The great bird ascended from a shallow, trailed his thin legs over the water, then gathered speed, rose clear, steered with heavy and laborious flight amid overhanging boughs, and sought a lonelier hunting-ground elsewhere.
"Brutes! I always walk right on top of them when I'm not carrying my gun. I hate to think of the number of young trout they eat."
"Plenty left to grow big and be caught all the same," said Honor, as she peeped down to watch grey shadows, that sped up stream at sight of her and set little sandclouds rising under the clear water where they flashed away.
"Nothing like a Devon trout in the world, I think," she added. "I caught a half-pounder in the Wallabrook last night, just at the end of the evening rise, with that fly, like a 'woolly bear' caterpillar, you gave me."
Christopher Yeoland nodded, well pleased. He was a broad and tall young man of thirty, and he walked through woods and beside waters that had belonged to his family for years without count. Ardent in some things, sanguine in all, and unconquerably lazy, he had entered the world to find it entirely a problem. Succeeding upon several generations of shiftless and unpractical ancestors--men of like metal with himself--he stood the penniless possessor of a corner of Devon wherein Nature had exhausted her loving resources. He clung to the involved home of his fathers, and dreamed of retrieving the desperate position some day. He lived an open-air life, and spun courses of action, quite majestic in their proportions, for the succour and restoration of his property; but the taking of a definite step in any direction seemed beyond his powers. In theory he swept to action and achievement, and, if words could have done it, Godleigh had been freed from all encumbrance thrice in every week; but practically Christopher appeared content to live from hand to mouth at his old manor house, to keep one horse in the huge stables, two dogs in the kennels, a solitary old woman and one man in his echoing and empty house, where, aforetime, more than half a score of folk had bustled away their busy lives.