“I’m here in Garth to be sneered at,” said Gaunt, with sudden passion. “I knew it after the first day or two, Peggy, but I’d looked for something different from you.”
“You’re always like yourself, Reuben.” The girl looked at him with a quiet, impersonal surprise that was almost pity. “You’d pour honey into one ear and trust it to run out safely at the other. I’m the only lass in the world to ye, eh? Those will-o’-wispish eyes of yours are saying it. Yet honey stays sometimes; and a lass goes on eating it, and finds the taste on’t sweet.”
Reuben Gaunt took the basket from her arm and set it down; and then he grasped her hands and stood facing her. There was a suddenness and fire about him that the girl liked to see—as she would have liked to find the withes of her egg-basket not quite so slender as they seemed.
“Peggy, I’d thought to find a welcome here at Garth. There’s a damned conspiracy against me, and yet I came home again with soft and quiet thoughts enough, God knows. You’ve failed me, too.”
“You did not seek me out, Reuben, till you were tired of better folk.”
“More fool I, then, Peggy.”
“It takes you a fortnight to tire, I remember, and two weeks chasing other game, and then you’re back again.”
The girl laughed suddenly. To know a man to the core of him and find him wanting, and yet to be weak in his hands when he returns—it is a plight which brings women to the borderland where tears meet laughter. And tears are apt to conquer in such a case, though laughter is the safe, abiding road.
Across the ages came the call to the girl’s heart—“As a hen gathers her chickens under her wing.” She heard the voice. She was stronger than Reuben Gaunt, and knew it, and her pity lay about him like a mother-wing.
“Come close and hither, Reuben. There’s naught else will do for ye, ’twould seem,” she said.