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Ross owns in Looe lost its manager when a man called Blewitt-who was part owner with Ross, and part manager died. Ross offered the position to Drake, who took it, and they moved there in the following December. They have one daughter, thanks be ... Now do you see what I mean? All the foliage is going.'
    They had broken through the rough tangled trees and come to moorland, with goats pasturing, a water wheel turning in a stream and activating noisy iron rods, a few hovels on the sky-line, mules with panniers being driven along a cross lane. A strong wind blew the clouds low.
    'Ah,' said Amadora, 'it is a little more like Spain.'
    'But without the sun.'
    'Without the sun. But you do see it a veces? There is sun last night.' They jogged on.
    Geoffrey Charles said: 'The Reverend Osborne Whitworth had been so grossly offensive to his wife that Morwenna swore when he died that she could never marry again not even Drake. The physical act of love had been turned for her into something obscene. It was only after much persuasion, and after he had undertaken not to expect her to become his wife in a physical sense, that she eventually consented. Yet - a year and a half after their move to Looe a daughter wa s born . I was anxious when I went to see them ... Do you follow me, or do I speak too fast?' 'No, I follow.’
    'I found them both very happy with each other and devoted to their child. Morwenna - Drake said - was still subject to nightmares, and after such a nightmare she was out of sorts for a week or more and could not bear that he should touch her. But the nightmares were becoming less frequent; and anyway, always, Drake said, there now were the times in between.'
    Pigs were rooting outside a thatched cottage which leaned drunkenly towards a triangular field in which a woman and three children worked.
    'That is byertiful,' said Amadora.
    Geoffrey Charles laughed. 'It depends how you look at it. You see there were two cottages, but the other has fallen down. Do you understand the word picturesque?'
    'Of course. Pintoresco. But byertiful too.'
    The woman and the children had stopped work at the sound of voices and stared curiously. Geoffrey Charles raised a hand but none of them waved back.
    Now they were entering'a most desolate scene, in which there was no trace of vegetation left: all was given up to mining. The few cottages were squalid; naked or semi-naked children played among the attle thrown up from the excavations; green pools of slime let off an odour that was partly diluted by the smell of sulphur and smoke drifting before the breeze. Miners and muleteers in smock frocks moved about; thin and pale-faced older children were at work on the dressing floors, stirring the tin round and round in the water with their bare feet. It seemed that everybody was digging the ground, or had already dug it. There were oval pits, part full of water. In excavations only big enough and deep enough to hold a coffin a spade or two appeared and disappeared, and sometimes a felt hat was to be seen. There were seven or eight mine chimneys smoking, and as many dead, some of them already in ruin.
    'What is those things?' Amadora asked, pointing to the circular thatched huts which were dotted about. 'They are whyms.' 'Wims?What is wims?'
    'Whyms. They each cover a windlass, which lowers a bucket down that particular shaft. The bucket can bring up either water or ore.'
    Amadora reined in to stare at one of these huts, and at the two mules which moved in constant slow motion round and round the building, pulling a bar. An impish child sat on one mule driving them on with a stick. He made an obscene gesture at the well-dressed people staring at him.
    They rode on.
    'Take heart,' said Geoffrey Charles, seeing his wife's face; 'it is not all like this.'
    ‘I t shall be going to clear-see,' said the girl. 'Over there.'
    Like a sliding cover the cloud bank was slipping up from the horizon, revealing a sliver of bright light.
    'We must see them soon,'