“Then, lass, why willun’t ye wed me?”
“I cannot tell. Only—women have no second love to give. Why it should be so, God knows. But so it is, David. I could never feel for you—what I felt for another when we walked by the field-ways home to Garth.”
It seemed strange to Cilla that she felt no shame in the confession. She would have shrunk from it at another time; but now it was only of David she thought—of David, who asked for more than she could give him—of David, who asked for honesty, though she longed to keep him here in Garth.
“That’s true,” he answered quietly. “Neither man nor woman has second love to give. But there’s this to say, Cilla. Time and time, when you’re alone on the moor-top, a will-o’-the-wisp comes ’ticing ye into the marshes. True love is true love, lass, and ’tis steady-like; it doesn’t dance like a light-heeled clown at the fair.”
Priscilla of the Good Intent was tired, and saw life hidden, as the street of Garth was hidden by the sick, grey dust that cried to the skies for wholesome rain.
“You’re thinking of Reuben Gaunt?” she asked wearily.
“Ay, just of Reuben Gaunt—no more, no less.” David was watching her eagerly, not as a lover now, but with a dog’s look when he sees his mistress running into danger.
Cilla thought again of that spring journey out to Keta’s Well and home again. It called to her still, like the song of a laverock up above the pastures when spring is wild about the land. Gaunt’s words were in her ear. The kiss she had given him at the gate—the sweet of the growing grass—the surrender, and the glamour of it, and the big lands stretching out before her—Priscilla remembered every moment of that day. She knew that David the Smith was right when he named the glamour a will-o’-the-wisp; but she did not wish to know it; she resisted the knowledge with a curious, headstrong passion that she rarely showed.
“We are to part friends?” she said, in a low, unsteady voice. “You choose a queer way of saying good-by. There was no need to speak of Mr. Gaunt at all, still less to speak ill of him.”
“That is not like you, Cilla,” David answered quietly.