“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.