“Nay,” said another, “he seems like as he’s set on winning Peggy o’ Mathewson’s as well. There’ll be lile trouble i’ that, if the look in her face be aught to go by.”
Peggy and her man moved steadily up the field-track, then more quietly when they reached the heath.
“’Twas here you ran so well,” said Peggy, her eyes shining with some great, unreasoning happiness.
“’Twas because you asked it,” answered Gaunt, slipping her arm through his own as they turned to look down on moonlit Linsall. The faint screech of fiddles reached them, reedy as the breeze that blew fitfully about the heather-stems. She was silent, and Gaunt felt that she was trembling. “Why, what’s amiss? Surely you’re not cold on such a night?”
“Oh, it is naught, Reuben! I’ve had my day—as full a one as ever I could wish for—and I’m frightened, somehow, to go back, and begin to churn, and bake, and wash, and tend the fowls.”
“I can ease you of all that.”
Her eyes were soft, and full of the tenderness which life had tried its best to kill. She seemed about to speak, but checked herself.
“Will you listen, Peggy?”
“Oh, we must hurry, Reuben. Come away over the moor; there’s mother wondering all this while whatever can have come to me.”
He did not understand her mood, did not understand the withdrawal which was at once proud and full of mute appeal. They crossed the moor in a silence broken only by the scuffle of a sheep as they awakened it in passing, by the sudden whirr of a cock grouse as he rose from the ling and went barking to-bac, to-bac, to-bac across the moor.