“Tuts!” answered Widow Mathewson. “Few maidens do. Ye talk as if there were no modesty left i’ the world.”
“I’m so cold. All day it has been like a goose walking ower my grave—just as I said to Reuben when we walked fro’ Linsall Fair.”
The widow was easy in her mind to-night. Her hidden liking for Gaunt need not be checked so much in future; only she knew how bitterly she would miss Peggy in and about the house; but she knew, too, that it was idle or worse, to keep her lass from a home of her own. A glance at the girl’s face, white and pinched, might have startled Widow Mathewson; but she smoked her pipe, and looked into the grate, and hugged her self-content as a luxury seldom found at Ghyll.
“Fiddle-me-ree,” she answered, with pleasant tartness. “Th’ only geese as are walking abroad, to my knowledge, are ye an’ Reuben—an’ he’s a gander. Oh, lass, Peggy, I’ve it all by heart! Niver sich a one i’ the world as your man; an’ ye know his shortcomings plain as your own face in a pool; an’ ye throw bits o’ pebble into th’ pool, just to stir his proper likeness into pleasanter shape; an’ ye call it loving the lad. Lord o’ mercy, there’s been many a woman at yond pool-edge afore your time, and will be after. I war there myseln once. ’Tis only nature.”
Peggy got up and went out through the porch, and stood looking out and away across the moor.
“I war there myseln once,” repeated Widow Mathewson, with a tolerant smile. “I munnot forget what ’twas like—just the wee, lile fairies dancing, an’ witchcraft ower the moor.”
She knocked her pipe out on the grate, and youth touched her brown, scarred face for a moment.
“Good sakes,” she murmured, “I’d like to be young again like that—cobwebs about my eyes or no. Better be a blithesome fool at two-and-twenty than a wiser one at sixty.”
Five days later Gaunt returned to Garth. He came by the morning mail-coach, and sat by Will the Driver’s side, and asked as many questions regarding the health of Garth folk as if he had been absent for a year.
“Oh, they’ve ’scaped fever right enough,” said Will, trying to answer all his questions at once. “They’re a bit scared still, but forgetting all such rubbish. Widow Lister’s hale and hearty—ay, just a shade too hale and hearty. Billy is laking at the forge, an’ doing as much real work as David did, an’ willun’t take a penny for ’t. Has made a box, he, an’ tells all folk to put their silly money in through the slit and let it bide there till David comes again. He has no use for money, he—lile, wise lad as he is.”