“Not so sapless, after all,” she said, in her brisk, tart voice as she turned indoors. “There’s a farm to look after, and a lazy farm-lad to get up betimes to-morrow’s morn.”
Gaunt, meanwhile, had got down the fields as far as the foot-bridge that decides a man whether he shall cross to Garth, or turn to the right and seek the road which leads Marshlands way. Gaunt chose the left-hand track, over the slender arch of stone.
“I’ll go by way o’ Garth,” he said to himself. “The longest way round is pleasant on a night like this.”
The longest way round led him past Good Intent, and a big voice sounded from the porch as he neared it.
“Ye’ll have a rare fine day for your journey, Cilla,” Hirst was saying, taking all the parish into his confidence, though he thought his tone subdued. “I never saw a likelier sundown.”
Gaunt stopped. A senseless lover’s dread had seized him. Cilla going a journey? Had his hopes been all so much idleness? A journey meant travelling overseas, surely—and David was in Canada—and there had always been a friendship between them.
“Yes, father,” he heard Cilla answer. “You always did say I had luck o’ the weather when I took a journey.”
Gaunt moved forward. The girl’s tone was so quietly happy that he was sure now of his hasty guess. David was on his way home, so he had understood; but perhaps he had changed his mind at the last moment, had found a profitable farm out yonder, and Cilla was going out to him. He remembered her longing, a year ago, to see what lay beyond Garth hills; it was bitter to recall how eagerly he had prompted her restlessness, had talked of other countries until at last he caught her fancy. And now she was going out to marry David, and it would be the slow-going smith who showed her the strange lands.
The dim, white roads seemed to be slipping away from under Gaunt’s feet. He no longer wished to stay for a chat at Good Intent; his one desire was to get away with his misery, and conquer it as best he might.
The yeoman checked him. He and Cilla were sitting on the stone bench just inside the porch, as they had sat for the last hour. It was dusk along the highway, but the porch was darker still, and Hirst, looking out from its shelter, could not mistake the figure striding by so quickly.