The girl, humouring what she fancied now must be some delusion of the lad’s, crept under his outstretched arm and looked down. A strip of broken turf, charred with primroses, sloped to the bubbling stream, and at the water’s edge, Peggy was sitting with Gaunt’s arm about her waist.
Priscilla gave no cry. The stream, the two figures sitting by its rim, quivered and rocked, then circled round about her. The primroses made thin, waving lines of yellow across this evil, daytime vision. Then all was clear again—mercilessly clear—and Gaunt’s head was near to Peggy Mathewson’s, as last night it had been near to Cilla’s.
Priscilla of the Good Intent stepped back. She was pale, but willowy and upright still; out of the generations of the Hirsts that had fathered her, help came to her in the hour of need.
She walked slowly back into the field, Billy following close behind her. Whatever the natural had hoped to do by this exploit, it was plain that, to his own thinking, he had failed. He kept trying to find words, and, finding none, reached out his hands toward Priscilla, with a gesture piteous and helpless.
“Billy, I am troubled,” said Cilla, halting suddenly. “No, you are not to come with me this once! I am troubled—and, Billy, I must be alone.”
Grave and sweet her voice was, sweet and grave her consideration for the poor fool’s feelings when she had need to think only of her own.
The natural watched her cross the pastures; then his face twitched, and the lines came out on it afresh; and, after that, he threw himself on the ground and dug his fingers deep into the turf and cried like a three-year babe. Afterwards he sat up, his face vacant as of old.
“Seems as if Billy the Fool were shut up tight in a prison,” he muttered. “Wears what ye might call a band of iron all round his head-piece, like, and he thinks, and he thinks, and naught comes on’t. Miss Good Intent’s going to cry—and ’tis Fool Billy made her.”
Down yonder in the little dingle, Gaunt and Peggy Mathewson were saying good-by. For an hour they had sat by the stream, helpless in each other’s hands, as they had always been. Gaunt had once more told her frankly—he had found courage for that—that at all hazards he meant to wed Priscilla.
“Suppose I went and told her what ye’d said to me, and what ye’d looked at me, and all the sorry tale?” cried Peggy, roused from her desperate acquiescence in the gospel that what would be, would be. “Would you fare well, Reuben, with lile Miss Good Intent?”