"Och fi!" laughed Ann and Will together.
"One would think 'twas the downward path Will was going," said the former.
"No, no!" replied the old man, "'tis the path of life I was thinking of, my children. You don't know it yet, but when you come to my age perhaps you will understand it," and he sighed again wearily.
He had altered much of late, a continual sadness seemed to have fallen on his spirit, the old pucker on his forehead was seldom absent now, he was irritable and ready to take offence, and if not spoken to, would remain silently brooding in the chimney corner.
On the contrary, Ann's whole nature seemed to have expanded. Her happy married life drew out the brightness and cheerfulness which perhaps had been a little lacking in her early girlhood.
Gwilym Morris was an ideal husband; tender and affectionate as a woman, but withal firm and steady as steel; a strong support in worldly as well as spiritual affairs. Latterly the extreme narrowness of the Calvinistic doctrines, which had made his sermons so unlike his daily practice, had given place to broader views, and a more elevating realisation of the Creator's love. Many hours he spent with Sara in her herb garden, on the moor, or sitting by the crackling fire, conversing on things of spiritual import; and the well-read scholar confessed that he had learnt much from the simple woman, the keen perception of whose sensitive soul, had in a great measure separated her from her kind, and had made her to be avoided as something uncanny or "hyspis."
And what of Morva? To her, too, time had brought its changes. She was now two years older, and certainly more than two years wiser, for upon her clear mind had dawned in unmistakeable characters of light, the truth, that her relations with Will were wrong. She knew now that she did not love him—she knew now it would be sinful to marry him, and she sought only for a way in which she could with the least pain to him, sever the connection between them. She saw plainly, that Will had ceased to love her, and she rejoiced at the idea that it would not be difficult therefore to persuade him to release her from her promise. When one day she met him on the path to the moor, and he tried as of old to draw her nearer and imprint a kiss on her lips she started from him.
"No, Will," she said, "that must not be. You must let me go now. Do you think I do not see you have changed, that you have ceased to love me?"
Will noticed at once the dropping of the familiar "thee" and "thou"; and in his strange nature, where good and bad were for ever struggling with each other, a fierce anger awoke. That she—Morva! a shepherdess! a milkmaid! should dare to oppose the wishes of the man who had once ruled her heart, and at whose beck and call she would have come as obediently as Tudor—that she should now set her will in opposition to his, and dare to ruffle the existence which had met with nothing but favour and success, was unbearable.
"What dost mean by these words, lodes?[1] how have I ever shown that I have forgotten thee? Dost expect me, who have my studies to employ me, and my future to consider—dost expect me to come philandering here on the cliffs after a shepherdess?"