The preacher pressed one hand close upon his heart, and let his eyes note the slender lines of the girl's figure, fast ripening towards womanhood. She seemed fresh and sweet as the wind and sun and water that played with her. Gabriel Hirst looked at the lassie's face, and his pulses leaped to a new delight. He lost his rigid set of body, and stretched out both arms wide to the moors; this was his apology for past misrepresentations.
Down the steep hillside he went, stumbling into rabbit-holes, pricking his ankles with thistle-needles, falling and picking himself up again. The girl became aware of an intruder: she glanced up the hill, and left the water, and seated herself on a pine-log that lay beside the stream. By the time that Gabriel Hirst had reached the brook and jumped it, her little white feet were safely under cover. He stopped; the inspiration that had led him here was at an end, and he had no knowledge of the things that young men say to maidens.
"Why didn't you turn back when you saw me?" demanded the girl. A red flush, of shame and anger mixed, had risen to her cheeks.
Not a word spoke Gabriel Hirst. His late fervour at the chapel, his lifetime of repression and battling against the vital part of himself, seemed to have been swept clear away; he could do nothing but wonder at this new-found form of Grace.
She laughed, a little, musical, defiant laugh.
"I thought I was safe for a good half-hour yet, Mr. Hirst. You keep them so long at chapel when you preach, and I counted on that. Besides, I was only watching the path up the Dene; no one ever comes the way you came just now."
He winced, and the girl laughed again.
"I—I preached for close on an hour," he said slowly.
"Gracious! I'm glad I was not there. But is it really so late? Time seems to pass so quickly, when one is being a sinner."
"A sinner!" gasped the preacher. It had been so clear, a moment ago, that sin was at an end; and now the old battle-cries were beginning to ring in his ears; they clashed with that rounded, human laugh.