It was a little sign of the new days, but a clear one, that the girl’s pride was content with his half-tender, half-easy use of her name. She did not call him Mr. Gaunt, but avoided any name when speaking to him.
“But you had the life—the life.” Her voice was almost passionate. “You did not see the same hills every day, and churn the butter whenever Thursday came, and milk the cattle o’ nights and mornings, from spring’s beginning to winter’s end.”
“No, Cilla—yet, somehow, when the old folk died and left me Marshlands, and word came to me that the snug property was mine, I longed for the home-fields—longed to settle down.”
Reuben was sincere in this, so far as his way of life allowed him to be sincere in anything. He was glad to be home again, glad to revisit nooks and corners which he had known in boyhood. Even the wanderers need their rest sometimes, and this man with the queer, wild eyes was fonder of Garth village than he had ever known.
“I must take a wife, Priscilla, now that I have something to keep her on,” he went on, leaning against the gate-post and stroking his upper lip. “Marshlands will never thrive unless it has a mistress.”
Priscilla looked straight in front of her, with a heedlessness that angered Gaunt. Keen-witted as he was, he should have known that Yeoman Hirst’s daughter was not one to be wooed at the end of two weeks and a day.
“Yes, ’twill need a mistress,” she said, indifferently.
Her thoughts were all of the new lands that Gaunt had opened to her fancy, and she would have answered, had she been asked the reason of her interest in Reuben, that he was the bringer of stirring news, and heartsome news, into the round of her life at Garth.
Gaunt was silent for awhile; wooing had sped so easily with him in times past that contempt or opposition ruffled him.
“Suppose you choose my wife for me, Cilla?” he said at last, with would-be playfulness. “Fair or dark is she, and can she manage a dairy and a roomy house?”