If ever two folk were given the one right day and the one right place for wooing, Gaunt and Cilla were favoured now. The peace of the lane, the eagerness of all the teeming life about them, the very fell-tops, pointing with white fingers to the blue and happy sky, seemed made for them; and Cilla was proving once again the truth of the Garth saying that “Miss Good Intent could always have the Queen’s weather for the asking.”
A year ago they had trodden the same lane as boy and girl, had kissed, and fancied life held nothing better. They had seen life face to face since then, had lived through long, ugly days that seemed too sordid for romance; yet here was the glamour, walking step by step with them, a glamour that was built, not on the sands of fancy, but on foundations sure as those of the sturdy hills about them. Gaunt turned to look at Cilla. She was dainty in her lilac frock. Any man, passing her, would have halted for a second glance at this lass whom Strathgarth summers had treated kindly, whom Strathgarth winters had given a reliance unknown to folk bred amid softer climates. He scarcely knew the face of which he had dreamed of nights; its peace, and its tender, eager beauty, were borrowed from all that lay beyond Garth hills, and from all that lay within them.
They came to the bend of the lane where last year they had met Peggy o’ Mathewson’s, and Cilla halted for a moment.
“Poor Peggy,” she murmured, generous and warm of sympathy as this day of spring that set the world to rights.
“It was never meant to be,” said Reuben, with no assurance in his tone, but rather like a child who gropes helplessly for the answer to a riddle.
And Cilla smiled through her tears. “My dear, it was never meant to be. Reuben, there’s a lile bird singing at my heart. I can’t mistake the song.”
“No wonder they called it Fairy’s Lane,” said Reuben. “I used to laugh at the notion once.”
CHAPTER XXV
DAVID the Smith had chosen this same day of spring for his return to Garth, though he had sent no word of his coming to Yeoman Hirst. He remembered the boisterous good-will shown him when he left the old haunts to cross overseas. Because he returned the same single-hearted David who had loved Garth village from his babyhood, he was shy of such another welcome at his home-coming. He would not take the mail from Shepston, the mail which carried Gaunt and Cilla to their betrothal, but walked instead.
He wanted to see the daffodils in bloom, in the crofts and the wayside gardens that bordered the highroad. He wanted to be free of chatter, and to feel his two legs carrying him, as a man’s legs should, between the grey, remembered hills. He wanted, most of all, to find Cilla of the Good Intent at home, and to tempt her—God’s pity on the man’s brave simplicity—with tales of other lands.