unlucky. On the first count I could understand her rejecting such a
gift; for the folk of these parts know nothing of statuary and count
all nakedness immodest. Indeed, I wondered that the bridegroom had
not taken Luke's freedom in ill part, and I said so: to which he
answered, smiling, that no man ever quarrelled with him or could
quarrel. "And now, sir," he went on, "my apprenticeship is up, and I
am going on a long journey. Since you find my group pleasing I would
beg you to accept it, or--if you had liefer--to keep it for me until
I come again, as some day I shall." "I do not wonder," said I, "at
your wish to leave Lezardew Parish for the world where, as I augur,
great fortune awaits you." He smiled again at this and said that,
touching his future, he had neither any hope nor any fear: and again
he pressed me to accept the statuary. For a time I demurred, and in
the end made it a condition that he altered the faces somewhat,
concealing the likeness to John and Grace Magor: and to this he
consented. "Yet," said he, "it will be the truer likeness when the
time comes."

'He was gone on the morrow by daybreak, and late that afternoon the
farmer brought me the statuary in his hay-wagon. I had it set in the
garden by the great filberd-tree, and there it has stood for near
five-and-twenty years. (I ought to say that he had kept his promise
of altering the faces, and thereby to my thinking had defaced their
beauty: but beneath this defacement I still traced their first
likeness.)

'Now to speak of the originals. My way lying seldom by Goldsithney,
I saw little of John and Grace Magor during the next few years, and
nothing at all of them after they had left Goldsithney (their
fortunes not prospering) and rented a smaller farm on the coast