PRISCILLA OF THE GOOD INTENT

PRISCILLA OF THE
GOOD INTENT
A ROMANCE OF THE GREY FELLS

BY
HALLIWELL SUTCLIFFE
Author of “Mistress Barbara,” “Benedick in Arcady,” etc.

BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1909

Copyright, 1908,
By Halliwell Sutcliffe.
Copyright, 1909,
By Little, Brown, and Company.
All rights reserved
Printers
S. J. Parkhill & Co., Boston, U.S.A.

PRISCILLA
OF
THE GOOD INTENT

CHAPTER I

THE blacksmith’s forge stood just this side of the village as you entered it from Shepston, and David Blake, the smith, was blowing lustily at his bellows, while the sweat dripped down his face. The cool of a spring morning came through the doorway, against which leaned a heavy, slouching lad.

“Te-he, David the Smith! Sparks do go scrambling up chimney,” said Billy the Fool, with a fat and empty laugh.

They called him Billy the Fool, for old affection’s sake, with no sense of reproach; for the old ways of thought had a fast hold on Garth village, and a natural was held in a certain awe, as being something midway between a prophet and a child.

“Ay, sparks are scrambling up. ’Tis a way they have, Billy,” answered the other cheerily. “What’s your news?”

Again Billy laughed, but cunningly this time. “Grand news—all about myself. Was up at sunrise, and been doing naught ever since. I’m main fond of doing naught, David. Seems to trickle down your body, does idleness, like good ale.”

The blacksmith loosed his hold on the bellows’ handles and turned about, while he passed a hand across his forehead.

“Is there nought ye like better than idleness?” he asked. “Think now, Billy—just ponder over it.”

“Well, now,” answered the other, after a silence, “there’s playing—what ye might call playing at a right good game. Could ye think of some likely pastime, David?”

“Ay, could I. Blowing bellows is the grandest frolic ever I came across.”

Billy was wary, after his own fashion, and he looked at the blacksmith hard, his child’s eyes—blue and unclouded by the storms of life—showing big beneath their heavy brows of reddish-brown.

“I doubt ’tis work, David,” he said dispassionately.

“Nay, now! Would I ask thee to work, lad? Fond o’ thee as I am, and knowing labour’s harmful to thee?”

“I shouldn’t like to be trapped into work. ’Twould scare me when I woke o’ nights and thought of it.”

“See ye, then, Billy”—blowing the bellows gently—“is it work to make yon sparks go, blue and green and red, as fast as ever ye like to drive ’em? Play, I call it, and I’ve a mind, now I come to think on’t, just to keep ye out o’ the game, and go on playing it myself.”

Billy drew nearer, with an anxious look. “Ye wouldn’t do that, or ye’d not be blacksmith David,” he said, with unerring knowledge of the other’s kindliness. “Te-he! ’Tis just a bit o’ sporting—I hadn’t thought of it i’ that light.”

And soon he was blowing steadily; for the lad’s frame was a giant’s, when he chose to use it, and no fatigue had ever greatly touched him. From time to time, as the blacksmith paused to take a red-hot bar from the furnace or to put a cold one in, he would nod cheerfully at Billy the Fool and emphasize the frolicsome side of his employment.

“Ye’ve an easy time, Billy,” he would say. “See me sweating here at beating iron into horseshoe shape—and ye playing at chasing sparks all up the chimley!”

The sweat was pouring from Billy, too, by this time, but he did not heed. Plump and soft his laugh came, as he forced the sparks more swiftly from the coals.

“Was born for playtimes, I, David,” he cried in great delight. “I’ve heard tell of silver spoons, popped unbeknownst-like into babbies’ cradles. I war a babby o’ that make, I reckon, for sure ’tis I’m always playing, when I’m not always idling in between times.”

“Ye were lucky fro’ birth,” David answered, driving the hole for the last nail. “Some folk is, while other-some must work.”

“Why do ye work, David?” asked the other, with entire simplicity.

“Oh, just a fancy, lad. Seems as I have to, somehow. There were no silver spoons dropped into my cradle. Hive o’ bees swarmed there, I fancy, for I’ve had a few in my bonnet ever since.”

There was another silence, while Billy the Fool, working hard at the bellows, looked long and meditatively at David Blake.

“I wouldn’t like to hurt ye, David,” he said at last, “but I reckon ye’re just a bit daft-witted like. Why don’t ye play or idle all your time, same as I do?”

David threw the finished horseshoe on the heap at his left hand, and was about to answer when a shadow came between the reeking smithy and the fresh and open sunshine beyond the door.

“Oh, ’tis ye, Priscilla?” he said, looking up. “Ye’ve got the spring-look in your face.”

As she stood half in, half out of the smithy door, Priscilla was radiant in her young and pliant beauty. To David Blake’s fancy—rough, kindly, not far wide of the mark at any time—she “made the day new-washed and happier”; yet it was Billy who next found his tongue.

“Te-he! Ye look as if life was playtime for ye, too,” said he, still blowing at his bellows, but looking at her slily over his shoulder.

“Maybe,” she laughed—and the kind, wise music of the thrush was in her laughter. “’Tis very true, Billy. Life’s playtime for me.”

David Blake looked at her, and liked her a little the better; for he knew that Priscilla worked hard, worked long and with a blithe face, each day of her life. To the blacksmith it seemed, in between doing odd jobs that brought him in a livelihood, that his prime work in life was to love Priscilla ever and ever a little more—and each day to find himself more tongue-tied in her presence.

Again it was Billy who took up the talk, though Blake would think to-morrow of twenty things he might have said, and curse himself in a quiet way for having failed to say them.

“I’m always playing, as a man might say, myself,” chuckled the Fool. “Playing at bellows-blowing now. See the lile sparks go up, Miss Priscilla—’tis I that send them, right enough.”

“Why, yes,” she said, nodding pleasantly at his wide and gaping face. “We’re playing, Billy, you and I. Only the blacksmith works.”

“He’s a bit of a fool, by that token,” hazarded Billy.

The blacksmith, when he laughed at all, laughed from his lungs outward. “Always guessed it, Priscilla,” said he, making his anvil ring. “Billy’s a child, but old in wisdom. Bit of a fool I’ll be to the end, I reckon.”

“I’m playing, David,” said Billy, while the blacksmith halted in his work to steal a glance at Priscilla. “Get ye on with your work o’ making horseshoes, if I’m playing the tune to ye.”

Again David laughed. “Keeps me at it, Priscilla,” he said. “Never met a taskmaster so hard to drive a man as Billy.”

“We want ye at Good Intent,” said Priscilla, laughing too—and her laughter was a pleasant thing to hear, reminding David again of throstles when the spring comes in.

“You can ease your hold of the bellows, Billy,” said David, with an alacrity that was patent to the girl, modest and proud as she was. “When I am called to Good Intent Farm—well, I go, most times, and ne’er ask what’s wanted, and leave smithy-work behind.”

“Robbing me o’ my playtime,” panted Billy the Fool, as he mopped his forehead.

He looked up at David, and his blue eyes were wistful as a dog’s asking for commands.

“Ye’ll be idle now,” said the blacksmith. “Play first, laddie, and idleness after.”

“Ay, you’re right,—you’re always right, saving odd times, when you’re a Fool Billy like myself. Miss Priscilla has a trick o’ making ye daft-witted, I’ve noticed.”

The village natural, with his huge body and his big, child’s eyes, had a way of finding out his neighbours’ secrets, and had no shame at all in telling folk what each wanted to hide from the other. Priscilla turned her face away, and David reddened like a lovesick lad.

“Keep the forge-fire going quietly,” said the blacksmith. “That’s idleness for ye—just to lie dreaming this side of it, and time and time to put the fuel on.”

“Ay, that’s idleness,” said Billy, as he stretched himself—again like a shaggy, trusty dog—along the smithy floor. “Get ye to work, David, and leave me to my play-work.”

They went out into the springtime, David and Priscilla, and the breeze was cool and sweet about them as if it blew from beds of primroses. The lass wished that David Blake had more to say, wished that the quickness of the spring would run off his tongue’s end; she did not know that he felt it—more than she, maybe—but had no words in which to tell her of it.

“You make a body thoughtless-like, Priscilla,” he said at last. “Never asked ye what the job was I was wanted for; and here I am without a tool to my back.”

David was able to do so many jobs, and do them handily, that it might be one of twenty that was asked of him to-day, and he looked anxiously at Priscilla, to ask if he should go back for his tools.

“I was watching the water-wagtails,” she answered, scarcely hearing him. “They’re home to the old stream again, David, and that means the spring is here, or hereabouts.”

He watched the pair of mating birds sit, first on the low stone wall that guarded the stream, then flicker to the road, their white tails moving like a lady’s fan.

“Mating-time, Priscilla,” said he.

Something in his voice, something in the true, quiet ring of it moved Priscilla strangely.

“They’re bonnie birds, David,” she said. “Winter’s out, and springtime’s coming in, when they wag their trim, white tails.”

“Ay, true. But what tools ought I to have brought, like?”

Priscilla sighed, for dull-wittedness did not commend itself to-day. “No tools at all, David. The roan cow I’m so fond of has lodged a slice of turnip in her throat, and father cannot move it.”

“Easy as falling out of a tree, Priscilla. Lord, I thought you farmer-folk knew somewhat—but when it comes to a cow, ye’ve got to whistle for David the Smith!”

Priscilla glanced at him with a roguery as dainty and secure as that of the spring itself. “They say ye can talk to the four-footed things, David, and make them understand ye. Pity ye can’t spare more words for us poor two-footed folk.”

“Ay, but the beasts are sensible, somehow, lass. They don’t maze ye up with words and what ye might call the frills and furbelows o’ life—they just look at ye, and feel your hands going smooth and quiet down their flanks, and they know.”

“Billy has that sort of instinct, I have noticed,” said Priscilla demurely. “There’s not a dog in the countryside that won’t come and fawn on him—though some of our dogs are not just gentle.”

David gave another of his great, hearty laughs. “My father always said, when he was alive, that I’d been intended for a natural, and missed it only by good luck. I’m fond of Billy the Fool myself; simple and slow is Billy, and what he lacks in wit he makes up for in heart-room.”

“That’s true, David,” said the girl, a little daunted, as she often was, by David’s settled outlook upon things.

For herself, there were times when she longed to cross the limits of this life at Garth, longed for the romance of the beyond; but when David talked as he was talking now she felt shamefacedly that he was in the right to be content within the boundaries of the fields and the blithe, raking hills, the village smithy and the village farmsteads.

David Blake did not belie his reputation when, after following the wood-path through the Ghyll, they came to Good Intent—a grey and well-found homestead—and sought the mistals. What with surgeon’s skill and the skill that comes from utter friendship with all cattle, he did what neither Priscilla nor her father could have done.

“Give you thanks, David,” said Farmer Hirst, a broad, well-timbered man, with a voice like thunder on the distant hills. “She’s the pick of the lot, this roan ye’ve saved, and saving’s saving, whether it is your child or your cow that’s ailing.”

“Ah, now!” murmured the blacksmith, “there’s joy in saving beasties, and no thanks needed.”

“Well, thanks are waiting for ye when ye care to pick ’em up—which ye seldom do, David—and meanwhile I’ve to see if my men are cutting the thorn-hedge to my liking. Priscilla, there’s cake and ale within doors; there’s one in Garth can look better to David’s needs than ever I could do.”

Now David’s laugh was hearty; but it was a child’s whisper when compared with Farmer Hirst’s, especially when the older man fancied that he was using rare diplomacy. A true yeoman of the north was this master of Good Intent—owned his own house and land, his own quiet, wholesome pride, his line of goodly forbears. And so, because he had learned to know a man when he saw him, he had long ago chosen David as the favoured suitor.

“Lasses must wed, leaving their fathers lonely,” the farmer would say to himself as he sat o’ nights—Priscilla gone to bed—and drank his nightcap of hot rum. “I’d have felt less lonesome-like if Priscilla’s mother wasn’t lying green under sod, and me alone save for Cilla. But lasses must wed, and I’ve seen o’ late the mating look in Priscilla’s face. Well, her mother wore that look, once on a day, and I’ve seen no better in my long life, and never shall. It must be David—oh, ay, it must be David!”

So he left them together this morning, and his big voice seemed to echo up and down the grey, stone hills long after he had left.

Farmer Hirst had given the blacksmith many chances of this kind; and always it had been, as now, the signal for David to grow tongue-tied, for Priscilla to show the wild-rose flag of maidenly rebellion in her cheeks.

“’Tis kindly, this smell of a mistal,” ventured David by and by. “Sweet o’ the kine, I call it—’tis so lusty and so big to smell.”

Priscilla answered nothing. There’s something in the fragrance at a cattle-byre that makes for wooing, no man can tell you why; and the lass was young and was feeling two spring seasons meet in her—spring of her untried youth, and spring of the tried old world that knows its faith.

“Cilla, the throstles are singing out-of-doors,” said he, bending an ear toward the open fields.

His meaning should have been clear; for, when a throstle sings across the reek of an open mistal-door, the human oddities of speech should be altogether lost, and the world’s tongue interpret all. Yet Priscilla missed it, and disdained the thrush’s clarion note.

“Ay, David, and the world is turning round about the sun, and the stars come out o’ nights, and I’ve to do my churning by and by. David, is there naught beyond your throstles and your stars and the sun that guides the world?”

“Naught,” answered David stolidly. “They’re life, Priscilla, and maybe when we’re hid beneath the sward we’ll know of bonnier things—but not just yet, I’m thinking.”

It was David’s moment, had he known it. It needed a touch, a glance, a right word spoken that should ring in tune with the spring; and while he halted there came a sound of whistling all across the mistal-yard. It was not like Farmer Hirst to turn back when once he had set off, and Priscilla wondered whose the footstep could be—the step that was quicker and lighter than her father’s.

“One of the farm-men, maybe,” muttered David, remembering, now that the opportunity was like to be lost, the one right speech he should have whispered into Priscilla’s ear.

“No—nor yet father’s. ’Tis a town-bred step, David. Cannot you hear the mincing tread, as if he thought the sweet yard-litter could hurt a body’s feet?”

“Ay, now you name it, so I can. Treads nipperty-like, as a cat does. Mistrust that sort of going, I. Who can he be, Priscilla?”

“Some stranger likely. Some one that’s never smelled the warmth of a cattle-byre, so I should say.”

The footsteps sounded near and hurried now, but still there was that delicate, lady-like treading across what Priscilla had named the sweet yard-litter. David and the girl, looking from the shadows of the mistal into the open sunlight, saw a well-dressed figure of a man—a man neither short nor tall, neither dark nor fair—a man no way remarkable, unless the sun was full upon him, and, seeing him from a shadowed place, you noted the uncertain eyes which long ago had been a puzzle to his mother when he stood beside her knee.

“There was no one at Good Intent, except old Martha,” said the newcomer, lifting his hat with an air which David Blake could not have copied had Priscilla’s love depended on it. “She told me you were here—‘likely,’ she added, in the queer speech I used to know, ‘seeing the roan cow was sick, and you were tending her.’ Priscilla, surely you’ve not forgotten me?”

David Blake was the best-tempered man in all the long vale of Strathgarth, so folk said; but there were times when he was as ill to meet, as ill to look at, as if he had been a north-born dog, guarding a north-built threshold from a stranger he distrusted. And David listened to this prit-a-prat man who tried to mimick old Martha’s wholesome speech; and Priscilla, glancing sideways at the man who should have wooed her in the mistal—as women will glance toward a known lover from a rival known by instinct—Priscilla saw David Blake in a new guise, and one not pleasant to her on this peaceful day of spring.

She smiled at the newcomer, inclining her head a little in the pretty, willowy fashion that Garth village loved. “You’ve the better of me,” she said. “I do not remember you at all. Stay, though,” she added, seeing the sunlight on his face, with its inscrutable, wild eyes, “I seem now to have known you long ago.”

“Five years ago, Priscilla,” he answered, with a laugh which David swore was false to the note of throstles and all wholesome things.

“You ask me to remember some one I knew at fourteen,” said Priscilla quietly. “It seems long ago to me.”

David went to smooth the flanks of the roan cow, who turned her head and licked his waistcoat tranquilly from the topmost to the lowest button.

“I know him now,” growled the smith. “Garth has been well rid of him these five years, to my thinking. Pity’s he’s come back.”

He glanced again at the other man, and was overtaken by an impulse to throw his adversary bodily out of the mistal-yard; so he pulled himself together, as one who was accustomed to follow kindly instincts only.

“Well, I’ll be jogging, Priscilla,” he said, making for the door. “The cow is ailing naught so much, and ’tis time I got to smithy-work again.”

“So you’ve forgotten me too, David?” said the stranger airily, as Blake was pushing past him.

“Nay,” answered David, not seeing the proffered hand. “I remember you well, Gaunt of Marshlands—and I’ll bid you good day, as I was ever glad to do.”

CHAPTER II

“THAT’S a pleasant sort of welcome, eh?” said Reuben Gaunt, as he watched David’s broad back disappear round the corner of the stables.

Priscilla’s interest was awakened already, and the smith had done an ill turn to his own cause by arousing her sympathy as well.

“You’ll find pleasanter welcomes here in Garth,” the girl answered, with that candour of thought and expression which in itself was dignity. “It was stupid of me to forget you, Mr. Gaunt, but I was so little, when you used to play big brother to me and show me all the wonders of the Dene.”

“I think it must not be Mr. Gaunt. The folk who like me call me Reuben, as you did once.”

Priscilla was vaguely disturbed. Softness of speech and manner she understood, for she had ever been a favourite with the landed gentlefolk of Strathgarth; and, because she understood them, she detected the false note in Gaunt’s would-be correctness. Yet she pushed the distrust aside; for this man had been away from Garth for five long years, had seen the mysteries hidden in the beyond, and doubtless he could tell her of them.

“We are older now,” she answered, a little smile belying her rebuke. “It must be Mr. Gaunt, or naught at all.”

“Well, then, it must be Miss Priscilla, too?”

“’Twould be fitting, I think. Five years are not bridged in a moment, and father tells me I’m a woman grown, though I feel a child when the spring comes in as it is coming now.”

An older and more constant playmate than Gaunt of Marshlands sang to her—sang blithe and high—through the mistal-door; but she scarcely heard the throstle, for Gaunt brought news from the beyond.

“Where have you been these years past?” she asked, moving restlessly from foot to foot.

“Everywhere, I fancy,” laughed the other. “I’ve seen the world, as I always meant to do; and a queer world I’ve found it.”

As a child wipes the school-day’s sums from its slate, Priscilla lost the record of her working and her playtime hours. The grey serenity of Garth, the sweetness of its roadside gardens, the slow, rich gossip of its folk—these things went by her. She forgot the low, musical humming of the churn, the look of the butter as it lay, round and golden as a kingcup, on the stone tables of the dairy. She heard no longer the splash of milk into the foamy pail, the lowing of the kine as they gave their evensong of praise.

Not restless now, she leaned against the stall, her eyes wandering now and then to Gaunt’s, then returning to the mistal-yard and the croft beyond. She was listening to this man who had spent five years beyond the limits of Garth village, and his tales enthralled her. In an absent way she wondered that those well-known fields, the familiar yard, had never seemed so small as now.

Reuben Gaunt was talking well. The picture of the girl, her lissome outline framed by the oaken stall, her hands clasped above her head, the lights and shadows of the mistal playing constantly about her eager eyes—these might well have moved a duller wit than Gaunt’s to make the most of itself. And, when he stopped, Priscilla was silent, her head thrown further back and her glance going out and out, over the grey field-walls of Strathgarth, over its dingles and its hills—out to the borderland, and across into the unknown.

“You have come back suddenly,” she said at last. “None knew in Garth that you were coming home, or we must have heard of it.”

“I chose to return unawares, and see what sort of welcome Garth would give me without preparation.—And, gad, I learned from David Blake quite soon enough,” he finished, with an easy laugh.

“And shall you stay among us?”

He had been watching her during that long silence. Faults in plenty the man had, but in his way he could understand the finer lines of beauty; and now, as he met Priscilla’s eyes, he found her exquisite—something as faultless, and yet as natural, as a harebell swaying to the wind.

“Yes, I shall stay,” he answered.

Her eyes fell, in answer, not to the words, but to the tone. And, because she had been wont to look all folk bravely in the eyes, she grew impatient of her shame-facedness.

“I cannot idle all the morning through,” she said. “I’ll give you good day, Mr. Gaunt, and get to my housework.”

David Blake, meanwhile, had turned aside before he reached his smithy, and had crossed, by the stile at the road-corner, into the field where Farmer Hirst was busy hedge-cutting with his men.

“Hallo, David! Followed me up, like, have ye?” roared Hirst, as he chanced to turn his head while the smith was still half a field away.

“Ay, I like the sound and the look of cutting a thorn-hedge,” answered David, as he drew nearer. “Thought I’d come and set ye straight if ye were showing faulty hedge-craft.”

The two farm-men turned with their bill-hooks in their hands. They nodded at David and grinned at his simple pleasantry. Lithe, clean-built fellows they were, both of them, such as they breed within the boundaries of Strathgarth, and they were friends and, save in the matter of wage-earning, they were roughly the equals of their master.

“Come ye, then,” chuckled the farmer. “See what we’ve done a’ready, David! See how trim and snug the whole line lies of it! Nay, not that way, lad!” he broke off, as one of the hands began to lay a stout hawthorn stem, sawn half-way through, all out of line with its fellow on the left.

He bent the branch as he would have it lie, then stepped aside—for a heavy man, Hirst was oddly active in his movements—and set to work to pluck a root of dog-briar from its deep bed. Twist and turn the root in his hands as he might, it would not budge.

“’Tis all these durned leather gloves,” he said, throwing his gauntlets off. “They keep the prickles out, David—or reckon to—but when a body wants his naked hands—well, let him wear them naked.”

Again he tugged, but the old root would not give; so David grasped Priscilla’s father by the middle, and “Yoick!” he cried, and they pulled together. The root left its hold, more suddenly than they had counted on, and David, being the hinder of the two, bore the full brunt of the farmer’s fall.

David got to his feet by and by, and coaxed the wind back into his lungs. Farmer Hirst was laughing till the tears ran down his ruddy face; the men were laughing, too; so David, soon as he found breath, fetched out that slow, deep body-merriment of his.

“We got him out o’ground! Oh, ay, we daunted yond old briar-root!” said he.

Whereat the four laughed so heartily that a pair of curlews—just returned, like Reuben Gaunt, from sojourning God knew where—got up from the further side of the fence, and went crying toward the moor.

“Briar-roots are the devil and all,” said Hirst, “when ye come to clean a hedge-bottom.”

“Bear bonnie roses all the same, when June comes in,” ventured the blacksmith, not telling Hirst that wild roses reminded him, too often for his peace of mind, of Priscilla. “Pity to stump ’em up, say I, and pity came of my lending my hand to the job just now.”

He made pretence to rub himself, as if the farmer’s bulk had raised painful sores on him. It is easy to laugh when the spring’s a-coming in, and the four workers startled a black-faced ewe that was near to her first lambing season.

“Get away wi’ your jests, David,” answered Farmer Hirst. “D’ye think I want to have my lambs dropped hasty-like in the ditch down yonder?”

Yet by and by, when they had worked their fill at the hedge-cutting, and it was dinner-time, David drew the farmer aside. He had not known till now what had brought him to the fields here, instead of to the smithy where he had urgent work to do. For the blacksmith’s brain was like an eight-day clock that stands in the kitchen corner; it moved slowly—tick-tack, tick-tack, with sober repetition—but, when the moment came to strike the hour, there was never any doubt as to the time he had in mind.

“John Hirst,” he said, “ne’er mind your dinner yet awhile. I’ve somewhat lies on my chest, as a body might say.”

“Well, I lay there not a long while since, a trifle sudden and a trifle hard,” laughed Hirst.

“Ah, now, will ye be quiet? I’m like Fool Billy, as Priscilla said just now, and ye think I’m jesting when I’m trying to talk sober sense.”

“Dinner-time is sober sense, David, judging by my itch to get at cheese and bread and good brown ale. What then, lad? What ails ye?”

“I’m slow of speech, unlike my smithy-bellows,” went on the other doggedly. “I find the right word always the day after to-morrow, instead of the day’s minute that I want it.”

“I’ve a trick of the same kind myself, David. What then? Speech is speech, but trimming a thorn-hedge, or ploughing for your turnip-crop, is a sight better than hunting words. Tuts, David! Ye’re yellow about the gills, and some trouble’s sitting on ye, by that token.”

“Ay, some trouble is,” said David.

“Priscilla gave ye cake and ale?” put in the other anxiously.

“She forgot to offer it, and I forgot to lack it.” David’s eyes followed the neat line of the hedge, and he nodded gravely at it. “Wish men were more like thorn-bushes, John—wish you could lop their unruliness, and twist their ill-grown branches into shape, and make a clean, useful hedge at the end of all.”

Farmer Hirst was thinking of his dinner with gaining tenderness. “What is in your mind, David, lad?” he asked. “’Tis like watching the kettle boil, this getting at your meaning.”

“Reuben Gaunt is back again in Garth,” the smith blurted out. “That’s my meaning, John, and I tell you we could well have let him stay t’ other side of the world, and ne’er have missed him.”

The farmer’s face clouded for a moment. “We could have spared him—ay. But what of it? Because a fool chooses to come home again, are we to go pulling fiddle-faces on a blithesome day like this? Hark ye, David, I’ll not bide a minute longer; there’s cheese and ale all waiting in the hedge-bottom yonder, and you’re going to share it with us.”

So David laid his trouble aside for the moment, and the four of them sat on the sunny hedge-bank, and said little until for the second or third time they took more cheese to help the butter out, or more bread to help the cheese out, or another pull of ale “to settle the lot trimly into place.”

“Wonderful March weather,” said the farmer, draining a last draught. “Near to April, and not a lamb-storm yet. ’Twill be twelve year since I remember such a spring.”

“Found a primrose fair in bloom this morn,” said one of the farm-men. “Wonderful weather, I’ll own, farmer—but what’s to come with April? Mistrust these easiful, quiet March-times myself.”

“Ah, get ye along!” cried Hirst. “Believe the best o’ the weather, I, and always did. They laugh at me in Shepston market—say I’m no true farmer, because I’ll not speak o’ the weather as if she were a jade for any man to mock at.”

There was a silence, while the men lay tranquilly against the bank and watched the blue sky trail her draperies of cool, white fleece across the west wind’s track.

“Reuben Gaunt is back, I’ve heard,” said one of the farm-hands presently. “Came last night, all unbeknownst-like, same fashion as he left, five years since.”

“There’ll be brisk times for the lasses, then,” put in his fellow drily.

Again the farmer’s face darkened for a moment. “’Tis work-time, lads, not gossip-time, and many a yard of hedge to fettle up before we get our suppers.”

“I’ll be getting to my own work, too,” said David, nodding his farewells and moving down the field.

At another time he would have put his own work off, would have taken a hand till nightfall with the hedge-trimmers, would have given them jest for jest and laugh for laugh, while he trimmed, and cut, and bent the hawthorn boughs into their place. But to-day he could not.

“There’ll be a brisk time for the lasses, then,” he muttered, echoing the farm-hand’s idle speech. “Ay, there’s always trouble o’ that sort when Reuben Gaunt’s at hand.”

Through the quiet fields he went, but they brought little benediction to him. He remembered Gaunt and all his ways, remembered how, when he left Garth, there had been no sadness in the men’s faces, but grief and bitterness in many women’s.

“What the dangment do they see in him, these lasses?” growled David, as he climbed the wall and dropped into the highroad. “Littlish in the build—face as good to look at as a mangold-wurzel’s—must be those devil’s eyes of his, that never lie still for a moment, but go hunting like a dog that sniffs a fresh scent every yard.”

David had summed up his man with unerring judgment in that last thought—so far, that is, as we can judge of any man. Had Gaunt been downright evil, it would have been easier for the men of Garth to have thrashed him long ago into a likelier and more wholesome habit. But even to-day, when he was in a mood that, for him, was bitter, the blacksmith knew that his enemy was neither good nor bad, but purposeless. He had watched him grow from childhood; and year by year his name of Reuben seemed more and more a prophecy of days to come.

“Unstable as water—ay, just that,” thought David, as he reached the smithy.

Billy the Fool, after dusting the smithy fire with coke and smudge, had settled himself to sleep again; but he was awake on the instant when David’s footsteps sounded on the roadway. He rose, and shook himself with a big, heedless satisfaction.

“I’ve been a-dreaming, David,” was his greeting. “Dreamed I was wise, like ye are at most times—saving when Miss Priscilla comes.”

“Ay?” said the other, patting Billy on the shoulder.

“I didn’t like it, David! Glad to waken is Billy the Fool. There wasn’t no frolic in’t.”

“I can believe you, lad. What news, Billy, since I went up street?”

It was the habit in Garth village to ask Billy for news, however many times a day you met him, though none could say how the idle custom had first come into use.

“Ay, there’s news. I’ve been at my games again, David the Smith.” A smile broadened slowly across the placid face, while the blacksmith listened good-humouredly.

“Never met your like for games, Billy,” he said, fingering his tools after the fashion of a man who means to begin work by and by, but not just yet.

David, indeed, was thinking less of work, and less of Billy, than of the encounter in the mistal. Reuben Gaunt had come like a shadow between the springtime and himself, had blurred the sun for him: keen to foresee, as slow men often are, the blacksmith felt as if a blight had fallen on Garth village, checking the warmth, holding the green buds in their sheaths.

Yet Billy soon claimed his ear. “I’d looked to your fire,” went on the natural, “and stepped out into the road, to see what time o’ day it was. Perhaps a half-hour since it was—and what d’ye think, David?”

“Couldn’t guess, lad, couldn’t guess.”

“Well, there was a littlish man, all dressed up as if ’twere Sunday; and he came down the road, and I knew he’d been to Good Intent.”

David glanced sharply up. “How did you know that?”

“Miss Priscilla lives there. All the younger men—and happen a few o’ the old uns too—will always be wending Good Intent way when the spring comes in. Habit o’ theirs, David—habit o’ theirs! I go that way myself sometimes.”

The blacksmith, not for the first time, was puzzled by Billy the Fool. The natural’s unerring instinct for all that made for the primitive in bird or beast or human-folk, when coupled with his child’s disdain of everyday good sense, would have troubled keener wits than David’s. He recognized Reuben Gaunt, moreover, from the other’s description, and he fingered his tools no longer, but followed Billy’s story.

“Came whistling down the road, did the littlish chap. I wondered, like, at what, for ye or me could have outsized him two or three times over.”

David laughed, though he was little in the mood for it. At every turn of his path to-day—whether he were talking to Priscilla, or dining in the hedge-bottom with Farmer Hirst, or talking to Billy—Gaunt’s shadow crossed his path. Yet he laughed, for he was simple, too, and big, and there was something that tickled his fancy in this quiet assumption that little men had little right to whistle on the Queen’s highway.

“Came whistling down, did he?” asked the blacksmith, strangely eager for the story.

“Ay, and stopped when he saw me. ‘Flick-a-moroo!’ says he, and twitched my chin, and seemed to think he’d played a jest on me.”

Again David chuckled; for there was none in the Dale of Strathgarth that could mimic a man as faithfully as Billy, and he had caught Gaunt’s mincing accent to the life.

“‘Flick-a-moroo,’ says I, easy as answering a blackbird when he calls. I didn’t like having my chin tickled, David, but I bided like, as one might say. And then he says—’tis queer and strange how little a grown man can be, yet can strut like a turkey-cock—‘Ye seem to know what’s the meaning of flick-a-moroo’ says he, ‘though it’s more than I do.’ ‘Ay, I know the meaning of flick-a-moroo,’ I says.”

“Well, lad?” asked David, waiting till he had finished a laugh that came before the end of the story.

“Ye see, David”—a happy, cunning look was in the natural’s face—“ye see, we were near t’ other side o’ the road yonder, and I minded there was a snug, far drop over th’ wall, and some young nettles growing soft as a feather-bed. So I says again, ‘Oh, ay,’ says I, ‘I know the meaning o’ flick-a-moroo,’ says I; and I catches him, heels and head—’twould have made ye crack wi’ laughter, David, to see it—and I holds him over the wall awhile, and drops him soft as a babby into th’ nettles.”

Again David laughed. He could not help it. “And then, Fool Billy?” he asked.

“Why, I went and looked at him, and I says, ‘Oh, ay, I know what’s the meaning o’ flick-a-moroo,’ says I—‘and so do ye, I’m thinking.’”

David felt a joy in this daft enterprise as keen as Billy’s. Was it not the expression of feelings which he had himself only checked with an effort up yonder in the mistal-yard?

“’Twas outrageous, and not like ye, Billy,” the smith observed, his whole face twinkling. “Should’st be more civil when strangers come to Garth.”

Billy looked apprehensive for a moment; of all things, after work, he hated the reproof of those whom, in his innocence, he fancied to be wiser than himself. A glance at David’s face, however, reassured him.

“Civil when strangers are civil, David,” he chuckled. For Billy, vague as his outlook upon morals was, showed himself persistently on the side of the Old Testament. “I’d bested him, ye see! Owned he didn’t know what flick-a-moroo meant. Billy the Fool did.”

“We’ll have a change of play, Billy,” said the smith. “Just make the bonnie sparks go scummering up again, and I’ll to my work o’ making horseshoes.”

David stole many a look at the other’s face as they went forward with their labour. He was realizing that there were possibilities of tragedy about this lad with the big frame and the dangerous strength. It was a jest to drop a man gently into a bed of nettles—but what if Billy’s passion were roused in earnest? What if some one pierced through that slothful outer crust of his, and touched some deeper instinct in him?

“Might be a sort of earthquake hidden in poor Billy,” he muttered. “’Tis hard to guess what he’s thinking of, right at the beating heart of the chap.”

The smith would have been astonished, had he been able to sound these heart-beats of his comrade’s. It was Priscilla he was thinking of—Priscilla of the Good Intent—Priscilla, who brought the sunshine into Garth for one poor fool whenever she crossed his path.

“She’ll be fettling up the house-place now, I reckon,” said Billy suddenly.

“Who, lad?”

“Why, Miss Priscilla. ’Tis her time of day for doing on’t. Te-he, David! I hoicked yon chap fair grandly over th’ wall—Sunday clothes, and pritty-prat speech, and all. Nettles don’t sting i’ March, they say—but I’ve known ’em do that same.”

CHAPTER III

SPRING was abroad indeed these days. Garth village, good to see even in grey winter-time, grew to the likeness of a well-kept garden. The winding street—white at one time, then glistening-grey when the sun shone on it through April rain—moved lazily between the cottages and the yeomen’s square, substantial houses. And always, between the house-front and the highway, there was a garden, big or little. Sometimes—when the cottage was so small in itself that there seemed no room for a garden-space—there would be a strip, no more than two feet wide, fenced round to guard it from the wandering ducks and geese and dogs of Garth. Sometimes a bigger house would shrink, with disdainful pride, from too close a rubbing of shoulders with the street; and its garden would be wide and guarded by a grey stone wall, with a white-painted gate in the middle of the wall.

But always, right and left of the good street of Garth, there were gardens, and, whatever their size or shape might be, the same flowers bloomed in all. Crocuses still glowed yellow when the sun came out to waken them; but these were of the older generation, and daffodils were nodding already high above them with the effrontery of youth. Auriculas were showing the white miller’s-dust about their buds; the ladslove bushes pushed out green, fragrant spikes into this unexpected weather; primroses caught the laughter of the spring, and celandines looked humbly at the sunlight.

Priscilla of the Good Intent, as she came down the street, was no way out of keeping—so the kindly gossips said, standing each at her sunlit door—with the gardens and the weather. For it was true that not men only, but women, were reminded always of a flower when their eyes fell on Priscilla; and each was apt to choose his own favourite flower as Cilla’s namesake.

The village parliament, made up of men and women both, is seldom wrong when it passes judgment on a neighbour; and there was none in Garth who would deny off-hand that Priscilla of the Good Intent was rightly named, thanks to the title of the farm on which her father, and his fathers before him, had laboured thankfully.

“There goes slim Miss Good Intent,” said one cottager to another, across the quickset hedge that parted them.

“Ay! Sunshine all along the street,” the other answered. “Trust she’ll fall into a good man’s hands; for into some hands she’ll fall soon, or else a lad will just reach up and pluck her.”

Priscilla had smiled and nodded to them as she passed—nodded and smiled, indeed, the length of Garth Street, as if she were the lady of the village. She was no less, indeed, for she had that simple pride which knows its station and disdains no greeting on life’s highroad. Unspoiled as a primrose, opening to the warmth of spring, was Priscilla; and it seemed the pity of life that she should ever have to meet contrary winds.

Billy the Fool, at the extreme end of Garth, was passing the time of day with David the Smith, as his wont was; for the two were rather like an elder and a younger brother, and sought each other out by instinct. It was two weeks and a day since Billy had dropped his victim into a bed of growing nettles, and neither he nor David had spoken of the matter since—the blacksmith, because he was too fastidious, in a rough fashion, when a rival was in case; the natural, because he forgot such trifles until the season for remembrance came. Reuben Gaunt, for his part, had kept silence, and had thanked heaven, in his own random way, that the jest of his sitting down among the nettles was not common gossip now in Garth. For Reuben hated to be laughed at, as the half and between men of this world always shrink from the laughter of their neighbours.

“The birds are all a-mating and a-building, David the Smith,” said Billy. “Cannot ye hear the throstles calling to the hen-birds?”

“Ay,” growled David, a sudden anger coming to him; “but ye and me are no way mated, Billy the Fool. What ails us, lad?”

“Life ails us,” said Billy unexpectedly. “We’re over slow and overpleasant, David. Chase ’em and have ’em, David the Smith—that’s how I’ve seen the bird-folk go a-wooing. Te-he, there’s Miss Priscilla!” he broke off, and seemed about to run and greet her, in his friendly, dog-like way, when a second figure came into the street from the bridle-track that led to Thorlburn.

The natural stopped, suddenly as if he had been indeed a dog and his master had whistled him down.

“Garth Street is not what it used to be, David,” he observed, dispassionately. “More muckiness about the roads, though why I know not, seeing they’re smooth and silver at this moment.”

David said nothing for awhile; but he saw Reuben Gaunt lift his cap to Priscilla, with that indescribable air of overdoing the matter which roused the blacksmith’s temper. He saw, too, that they stayed and chatted—Priscilla laughing—and afterwards went up the Thorlburn bridle-way, which led to a field-track winding at long last to Good Intent.

“Come in, Billy,” said the smith—his voice came suddenly, and was half-brother to a sob—“come away in and play at blowing the bellows, while I fire the ends of those posts that Farmer Hirst is wanting.”

“What does he want ’em for, like?” asked the natural, curious at all times.

“To make a pen for yon rambling turkeys. The hens will go wandering after the cock-bird, and they’re laying in the hedge-bottoms, and over t’ other side the beck, and Lord knows where. ’Tisn’t the hens I blame, Billy; ’tis the ruffling master-bird, with his tail spread like a silly peacock’s. Pen him in we will, Billy—and, if he breaks his neck in the wire-netting, so much the better for all sides.”

It was rarely that David allowed himself so stormy an outbreak. Had he taken his wooing in this fashion two weeks and a day ago in the farmyard of Good Intent, breaking down the barriers of diffidence—Priscilla’s and his own—there might have been a different life-tale for David the Smith.

“Te-he!” chuckled Billy the Fool, shambling toward the smithy. “’Twould be a rare game to pen in the turkey-cock. Gobble-gobble di-gobble, he goes, whenever he comes across the likes o’ me, and his wattle goes red as the floor, David, when a man’s been killing a cow. Ay, I’ll blow the bellows for ye, if so ye’re going to prison up yond old, prideful devil.”

“Soothes a body’s temper,” muttered David, after he had been at work for half an hour—thrusting the pine-posts into the blaze, turning them about, taking them away when the pointed ends were charred sufficiently, while Billy played contentedly and hard with the bellows. “God knows I’d like to see Priscilla happy, with me or another man; but Reuben Gaunt sticks in my gizzard like a fish-bone.” He laughed quietly, for he always sought from humour an antidote against the storm-winds of life. “Suits me, seemingly,” he said to himself, “to be fair mad with a man; for work takes the tetchy humours out of ye, and work pays ye afterwards.”

Could David have left his forge more often, in order to seek Priscilla’s company—and he was well-found already in the bread and cheese of life, and knew that there were savings of the years behind him—could David have understood that a maid, if you love her and she chances to love you, needs wooing with a desperate seriousness and a desperate gaiety—he would have been less interested to-day in the making of charred posts wherewith to furnish forth John Hirst’s turkey-pen.

Priscilla, meanwhile, was wandering up the bridle-track with Reuben Gaunt, and the little, plain-featured man with the wild eyes was talking to her—talk being his prime work in life—and telling her of the countries he had seen, the busy streets, the things remote from Garth’s quiet highroad, and Garth’s quiet hill-slopes where the work of farming life was done.

Like cloud-land drifting before a merry wind, the old life went receding from Priscilla of the Good Intent. The street of Garth grew dull; the singing of a farm-hand, as he strode up the hilly field in front of them, was so much noise in a rustic bauble-shop. Reuben Gaunt’s plain face, his little body, receded too, and only his wild eyes were left—the eyes that looked into hers and reflected, so she thought, the world beyond Garth village.

Billy the Fool, had he been in this quiet lane, would have been finding the first wild-strawberry bloom, or another blackbird’s nest; but Priscilla, who had loved such things aforetime, was looking far beyond them now.

“You had seen so many countries, and there were more to see. Yet you return to Garth,” said Priscilla suddenly.

They had halted at the gate that opened on the field-track to Good Intent, and the girl was leaning with her arms upon the topmost bar. The long and quiet glance she gave her companion was childish in its wonderment.

“Yes—to stay, I doubt. ’Tis free and pleasant to go roaming; but a man grows tired of earning his bread as best he can. I’ve been a jockey, a trainer, a gold-miner—a publican, Lord help me, for one whole year—and all seemed to leave me as poor as it found me, Priscilla.”

It was a little sign of the new days, but a clear one, that the girl’s pride was content with his half-tender, half-easy use of her name. She did not call him Mr. Gaunt, but avoided any name when speaking to him.

“But you had the life—the life.” Her voice was almost passionate. “You did not see the same hills every day, and churn the butter whenever Thursday came, and milk the cattle o’ nights and mornings, from spring’s beginning to winter’s end.”

“No, Cilla—yet, somehow, when the old folk died and left me Marshlands, and word came to me that the snug property was mine, I longed for the home-fields—longed to settle down.”

Reuben was sincere in this, so far as his way of life allowed him to be sincere in anything. He was glad to be home again, glad to revisit nooks and corners which he had known in boyhood. Even the wanderers need their rest sometimes, and this man with the queer, wild eyes was fonder of Garth village than he had ever known.

“I must take a wife, Priscilla, now that I have something to keep her on,” he went on, leaning against the gate-post and stroking his upper lip. “Marshlands will never thrive unless it has a mistress.”

Priscilla looked straight in front of her, with a heedlessness that angered Gaunt. Keen-witted as he was, he should have known that Yeoman Hirst’s daughter was not one to be wooed at the end of two weeks and a day.

“Yes, ’twill need a mistress,” she said, indifferently.

Her thoughts were all of the new lands that Gaunt had opened to her fancy, and she would have answered, had she been asked the reason of her interest in Reuben, that he was the bringer of stirring news, and heartsome news, into the round of her life at Garth.

Gaunt was silent for awhile; wooing had sped so easily with him in times past that contempt or opposition ruffled him.

“Suppose you choose my wife for me, Cilla?” he said at last, with would-be playfulness. “Fair or dark is she, and can she manage a dairy and a roomy house?”

“I had not thought of it,” said Priscilla, turning her candid eyes on him again. “’Tis for you to settle such grave questions, I should think.”

Her laughter hurt him afresh; and, while he was seeking for a way to meet rebuffs he little liked, John Hirst came up the road. Hirst was not one to scowl at any time; but his thick brows came together when he reached the top of the rise and saw these two together.

“Crossing homeward by the fields, Priscilla?” he cried, in a voice that startled them like thunder out of a tranquil sky. “Well, so am I, and we’ll just gang together, lassie.”

“Morning, Mr. Hirst,” said Gaunt, soon as he had recovered from his surprise.

“Morning, Mr. Gaunt,” answered the other gruffly, opening the gate. “Come, Priscilla—we’ll go arm in arm, as your mother came from kirk with me more years ago than I remember.”

Priscilla felt a big hand grasp her arm, and found herself, with no time for a good-by to Reuben, moving quickly up the field-path at her father’s side.

“Well?” said the farmer, presently.

Priscilla did not answer, but released her arm, and set a little distance between them as they crossed the fields. She was angered that her father had shown discourtesy—a thing uncommon with him—to the man who had laid strange, vivid colours on the palette of her fancy.

“Oh, you’re out of temper with your dad,” said Hirst, a big laugh forcing its way, willy-nilly, through all his disquiet. “So was your mother, over and over again, before I brought her safely to kirk. Hearken to me, little lass. Oldish men are foolish men, they say, and forget their youth; but Billy the Fool talks wonderful sense, just time and time, so I may do it with safety, eh?”

He halted to stroke the flanks of the roan cow which David had lately saved, then stole a look at his daughter’s face, and found rebellion there.

“’Tis as old as the hills, lass, this tale of what to do, and what not to do,” he went on, his voice quite gentle on the sudden. “Two folk leaning over a gate—a lad and a lass—and no harm done, maybe. Did it myself, when your mother was slim as you and I was courting her. But ye want the right lad and the right lass, Priscilla, for that sort of gate-over-leaning.”

Priscilla was no want wit, and the years had taught her that Yeoman Hirst could never so subdue his voice unless he were deeply moved.

“Father, ’tis so perplexing,” she said, taking his arm again in obedience to a friendship that was like no other in Garth village, save that between the blacksmith and his crony. “I do not like to see you disdain Reuben Gaunt.”

“And why, if I might ask?”

“Because there’s something bigger than Garth and its grey street.”

“Something lesser, too, I reckon. Go on, lassie. I felt the same myself once, and tried t’ other thing, and came back in great content to Garth. I once—”

“The world beyond, father!” she broke in, with one of those passionate gusts that were apt to surprise folk who thought her even-tempered and reserved.

“Ay—a small world, Priscilla,” chuckled John Hirst.

“Yet you longed for it once—father, you know how we have sat on Sabbath evenings in the brink-fields, and watched the sun go down, and played at seeing lakes and rivers and steep mountains in the clouds. ’Tis the same with me now. Reuben Gaunt has talked of strange cities, strange countries, lying out beyond the cloud-line yonder—and, oh, I want to get to them!”

“Reuben Gaunt would talk that sort of trash!” said Hirst, the strength and the stubbornness of the man showing plainly. “A here to-day and gone to-morrow man, is Reuben, lass, whether ye like to hear me say it or no. Cities and countries are there, over beyond where Sharprise cuts the sky? Well, then, they’re men and women in them, and men and women have been much the same since Adam’s time, I take it, save for tricks of speech and wearing-gear. You’d find naught different to Garth, Priscilla—but ye’d miss the homely hills, and the clover-fields, and the look of Eller Brook when spring is painting both banks yellow.”

Priscilla, because in her heart of hearts she was disposed to think her father right, was bent all the more, in her present mood, on being out of sympathy with him.

“I should like to see them—should like to judge for myself, father, as you and Reuben Gaunt have done.”

John Hirst had had his say, and now was minded to smooth the rough edges, as good-tempered men are apt to be when they have hurt a woman.

“And shall do, then,” he said, drawing her to him. “Only choose a likelier comrade for the journey, lass, when the time comes for leaving Good Intent.”

They had reached the hedge which Hirst and his men had been laying on the morning when Reuben Gaunt had come afresh into Priscilla’s life. Trim and low it stretched, the strokes of the bill-hook showing yellow between the green, primal budding of the thorns.

“Good work, yond, though I say it myself,” muttered Farmer Hirst.

“Yes, good work, father,” the girl answered absently.

She was not thinking of the thorn-hedge. Her father’s “Choose a likelier comrade for the journey,” meant in all kindliness and desire to warn her, had cleared her outlook suddenly. Reuben Gaunt had looked love enough in these two weeks to have lasted another man a year, but she had disdained to acknowledge the meaning of his glances. Priscilla—even to herself—seldom lost that habit of drawing maiden skirts away from men when they showed a disposition to intrude; but this morning she was forced to see the matter in its true perspective. Words dropped by Reuben, as if haphazard, recurred to her. He was no longer the scarcely-seen interpreter of worlds beyond her reach; he grew on the sudden to be the man who had seen these lands beyond, and she wondered if that wild look in his eyes were the mirror of something gallant and good to look upon.

The girl was so silent and so grave that her father twitted her good-naturedly. “Day-dreams, eh, lassie? They come in spring, I’ve noticed—ay, even to grizzled elders like myself.”

“Day-dreams, or day-realities—I scarce know which, father,” she answered.

Reuben Gaunt, meanwhile, was smarting under a sense of foolishness. Priscilla had laughed at him. The farmer had sent him about his business as if he were a hind.

“I get queer welcomes in this Garth,” he said, watching father and daughter move up the fields. “’Twould seem it’s naught at all to own Garth’s biggest house and richest lands. Garth is a bit like Billy the Fool—likes or dislikes at sight, and always did, however good a man’s coat is.”

Reuben was admitting unconsciously that his experience of the bigger world had led him to expect a welcome according to his station. He turned fretfully to return across the fields—in all his movements and his way of taking life he suggested something of a child’s perverseness, as if his body had aged and left his soul behind in the race of life.

He halted when he came to the first stile. His pride was smarting; his love for Priscilla—which touched already the random good in him—was rendered barren for the moment by that one girl’s laugh of hers. Small wonder that this man—who, after all, was as God made him, and therefore to be pitied somewhat—had never caught the fancy of the forthright villagers of Garth. He was too big in his own eyes, too eager to see insult where only friendly raillery was meant; too heedless of the truth that the right word at the one right moment is more than lands and raiment. Reuben could not stand against a real insult, such as Farmer Hirst had given him just now; and he sat on the stile and nursed his wrath, and, like his namesake, he was unstable as the wind.

He watched the patient fields, where the sunlight glistened on the clean, new blades of grass. Far up the pastures, a glint of limestone caught the sun and showed a track which, years ago, before he left Garth village, had been a wooing-trail for him.

“I’ll go and see Ghyll Farm again,” he said, getting down from the stile.

It was one of the big moments of Gaunt’s life, had he but known it. Yet he seemed to guess as little of it as the wind which, like himself, was turned by any hill that met it in its passage. He crossed the highroad, and climbed the further stile, and went up the track that led him to Ghyll Farm; and he whistled as he went, and moved with an eager step which folk, less versed in the ways of Reuben than the villagers of Garth, would have thought full of purpose.

The farm stood high up on the rise where the pasture-fields ran into the moor and lost themselves, and Reuben, seeing the rough, black outline of it a half-mile ahead, began to think of other days.

As if in answer to his thoughts, a big, strapping lass came up from the shallow dingle that cut the moor in two. She carried a basket of eggs on her arm, and she moved with a lithe, free swing that was almost insolent in its strength.

Gaunt forgot Priscilla, forgot her father’s insult. The worse man in him stepped forth, triumphant and uncaring as the girl who came to meet him.

“Why, ’tis you, Peggy?” said Gaunt, touching his cap, but not lifting it with the flourish which exasperated David the Smith.

“Seems so, Reuben,” she answered, setting down her basket and standing with a hand on either shapely hip.

It was not easy to read the look in Peggy’s face. There was derision, and rosy pleasure at the meeting, and defiance; and Reuben was daunted a little, for he liked women to go easily upon the rein.

“I’m home again, you see,” he said, awkwardly.

“Seems so. I heard you were back two weeks ago, and fancied you were overproud these days to visit Peggy Mathewson. Got a fine house of your own, and what not, now your folk are dead?”

“I used not to be overproud to visit you,” said Reuben, his eyes catching fire at hers.

“Well, no. But that was years ago, and you were always light to come and go, Reuben. D’ye remember that you left without a good-by said?” she went on, the grievance of five years coming out with sudden bitterness. “Mother talked to ye, Reuben Gaunt—would have thrashed you, I believe, but for your luck—mother is strong as a man to this day, and that’s more than you will ever be.”

Reuben’s face was like a dog’s when he has done amiss, and knows it, and tries to make you understand that he is innocent. Of all the welcomes he had found in Garth, this was the sharpest and most tantalizing.

“Had my folk to think of, Peggy. ’Twould have broken father’s heart—”

“Oh, ay!” The girl was fine in the strength with which she treated Reuben Gaunt. “You always had somebody’s heart to think of, Reuben, when you wanted to run wide and free from trouble. What of me, lad, left here to think of things?”

“You’re looking bonnier for the trouble, Peggy, left here or not.”

“Old trick o’ yours, Reuben. Your arm was ever lithe to slip about a lass’s waist, and your tongue to grasp a lie.”

They looked at each other, and Priscilla of the Good Intent was far away from Reuben.

“Could slip an arm about your waist this minute, Peggy.”

“Doubtless—if I’d let you.”

She stood away from him, alert, secure, yet with a careless touch of invitation in her glance.

“What is your errand, Peggy?” he asked after a pause.

“I’m taking a sitting of eggs to Hill End Farm. Folk fight rather shy of mother and me, Reuben, but they seem to know where to come when they want a clutch of Black Minorca eggs.”

He fell into step beside her, and Peggy only shrugged her shoulders. It was natural, and like old times, that Gaunt should ask no leave.

“Carrying my eggs all in one basket,” she said, by and by, after he had helped her over a clumsy stile. “Always did, Reuben, if ye call to mind. ’Tis a failing of the Mathewsons, I’ve heard tell. They don’t look to see if the basket is strong and well-found—they just take a daft fancy to the look on’t, and pop the whole clutch in.”