"Fforwel, then," said Ivor, and he held out his hand, which Hugh, after a moment's hesitation, grasped warmly. "If you are ever in any trouble, send for me, Mishteer, and I will come."
Again they said "Fforwel," and parted—Hugh Morgan with a feeling of burning indignation and a smarting sense of disappointment; Ivor with a dull, heavy aching, which he was not to throw off for many a weary month.
"Let him think me ungrateful and grasping," he said; "it is better for him than to know the truth. Fforwel, Hugh Morgan, I shall never meet a man like you again!"
Indignation and sorrow were the feelings uppermost in Hugh's mind as he sat smoking on his lonely hearth that evening. Madlen had gone to bed, and he sat long into the night, gazing into the dying embers of the peat fire, "chewing the cud of sweet and bitter thought." The announcement of Ivor's intended departure was a crushing blow to him. He had loved the man with all the tenderness which in his lonely life had had no other outlet until Gwladys Price's beauty had enslaved him; and even this had not altered his feelings for his friend, but had rather drawn him nearer to him. Mari Vone and Ivor had been his ideals of all that was manly and womanly, and his affections had gone out to them unstintingly; and now he would have been ashamed that any one should see how deeply he felt the change in Ivor—in truth, his bright, black eyes were dimmed with unshed tears as he knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and, slipping the wooden bolt of the front door into its hasp, walked slowly up the stairs.
The next day Ivor was absent from the sail-shed. Such a thing had never happened before, excepting when he had been attending to business for the Mishteer; but now everybody knew this was not the cause, and gossip, with its busy tongue, suggested all sorts of reasons—all of them, fortunately, very wide of the mark. "He had injured his back too much to continue working," one said. "The increased wages offered by Rees Carnarfon had dazzled him." "He was tired of Mwntseison, and thought this would be a good opportunity for making a move," etc., etc.
"What can it mean?" said a girl to Gwladys, as she entered the sail-shed in the morning. "What can have come to Ivor? Have you any idea?"
Gwladys shook her head, and would not trust her voice to speak.
"I'll tell you what they say," said the girl, "that he is jealous of you."
They were already beginning to drop the familiar "thee" and "thou" in addressing Gwladys. She noticed the omission, and blushed a vivid red.
"There!" said her friend, holding up her hands in admiration, "there's the colour we've been used to see in your face; in my deed, you are not like yourself lately. Twt, twt, it is not such a wonderful thing to be married that you need grow thin and pale about it. 'That will be the end of us all,' as the old maid said when she watched the wedding. There! look at her now, Mishteer!" And Hugh, who was just entering, gazed with admiration at Gwladys' blushing face.