He walked straight up to Ghyll Farm after reaching home, and Peggy was standing at the gate of the croft, looking down the moor. She half looked for him, and for that reason had fastened the crimson handkerchief round her throat; she had tied and untied it before her cracked mirror, with the honest coquetry which a woman finds when she knows that one man only has a claim on it.
Reuben saw the scarf, as soon almost as he caught sight of the waiting figure. The sunlight, stark and dry as the fields it had scorched, caught the warm colour of the kerchief.
“You look tired, Reuben,” said Peggy o’ Mathewson’s, after a quiet glance at his face.
“Well, yes,” he answered carelessly. “It was a hot drive into Shepston, and the fools would talk of nothing but their fever. I begin to think they’re proud of it, Peggy.”
“They’ve got used to it, you see,” said the girl, with something of her mother’s tart knowledge of the world. “’Tis queer, Reuben, how soon ye get used to a thing, even if ’tis bad, and seem to miss it when it goes.”
He scarcely heard her. His eyes were fixed on the crimson scarf, and she smiled happily as she followed his glance.
“Yes, I’m wearing your gift, lad. Mother chided me just now—said ’twas no sort o’ fancy-stuff to wear, when there were cattle needed milking by and by. I said you’d given it me at Linsall Fair and the lile, soft beasts would milk no worse because I wore it.”
Gaunt, though he did not know it, had caught something of the panic that troubled all the folk of Shepston. “At the back of his mind,” as he put it to himself, he was sure that Peggy would catch no harm from the scarf at this late day; the harm was done already, or not done; yet he could not rest so long as she was wearing it.
“Peggy,” he said, “I want that kerchief you’re wearing.”
Peggy o’ Mathewson’s laughed, though her eyes were full of disquiet. “Best buy another, Reuben, if you’re fooling me again. I’ll not let this one go to some lile fool who’s turned her blue eyes on ye and made geese seem swans.”