She was gone before he could find a last word to say. He watched her go, slim, willowy, the clouded moonlight on her trim, bared head; and then he turned, sick at heart, and went round to the croft to find his horse, and afterwards rode up the highway.
David the Smith and Billy passed him twenty yards or so away from Good Intent. David greeted his enemy coldly, but Billy seemed unaware that anybody shared the highroad with himself and David.
“Surly fools, the two of them!” muttered Gaunt. “Could give any man a greeting, I, at this hour of a warm night.”
Priscilla of the Good Intent had reached the porch, and stood there, half in the inner dusk and half in the moonlight. She was thinking, not of Reuben Gaunt, but of the night when she had seen David to the door, had bidden farewell to him, and afterwards had called “David—David, come back!” to unheeding ears. She was reaching out again for David’s hand-grip, as she always did in time of need.
David himself, as it chanced, had refrained from stepping in at the back door of Good Intent, as his wont had been. He had feared to meet Cilla, lest his resolution to leave Garth should once again grow weak. Yet now, as he glanced at the grey porch in passing, for old affection’s sake, he saw Priscilla leaning against one of the two round, limestone pillars that buttressed the porch.
“A fair night for the time o’ year, Priscilla,” he said, with would-be cheeriness.
“Ay, fair, David. But the wind blows shrewd at times, for all that.”
“Tuts! We wouldn’t be living, if there weren’t a shrewd wind to blow all our time o’ warmth away,” growled David, viewing life darkly, almost tragically, for once. “We’d be dead, Priscilla, and in a bonnier world.”
Billy the Fool had gone forward, with a quiet nod toward Cilla and an easy slouch, as if he remembered nothing of the morning; but David halted. In sun or rain, Priscilla was good to look at; to-night, with the moon-glamour on her face and the fret of new-found understanding in her voice, she was something up and above this world, to such as simple David, like the moon in the grey, still sky.
“David, is it true that you are leaving Garth, as father hinted?”