“I wouldn’t like to hurt ye, David,” he said at last, “but I reckon ye’re just a bit daft-witted like. Why don’t ye play or idle all your time, same as I do?”
David threw the finished horseshoe on the heap at his left hand, and was about to answer when a shadow came between the reeking smithy and the fresh and open sunshine beyond the door.
“Oh, ’tis ye, Priscilla?” he said, looking up. “Ye’ve got the spring-look in your face.”
As she stood half in, half out of the smithy door, Priscilla was radiant in her young and pliant beauty. To David Blake’s fancy—rough, kindly, not far wide of the mark at any time—she “made the day new-washed and happier”; yet it was Billy who next found his tongue.
“Te-he! Ye look as if life was playtime for ye, too,” said he, still blowing at his bellows, but looking at her slily over his shoulder.
“Maybe,” she laughed—and the kind, wise music of the thrush was in her laughter. “’Tis very true, Billy. Life’s playtime for me.”
David Blake looked at her, and liked her a little the better; for he knew that Priscilla worked hard, worked long and with a blithe face, each day of her life. To the blacksmith it seemed, in between doing odd jobs that brought him in a livelihood, that his prime work in life was to love Priscilla ever and ever a little more—and each day to find himself more tongue-tied in her presence.
Again it was Billy who took up the talk, though Blake would think to-morrow of twenty things he might have said, and curse himself in a quiet way for having failed to say them.
“I’m always playing, as a man might say, myself,” chuckled the Fool. “Playing at bellows-blowing now. See the lile sparks go up, Miss Priscilla—’tis I that send them, right enough.”
“Why, yes,” she said, nodding pleasantly at his wide and gaping face. “We’re playing, Billy, you and I. Only the blacksmith works.”