“Look ye, lass, and see if I am true or not,” he said.
Peggy laughed openly—it was her protest against this renewed, yet long discarded, half-belief in him. “Miss Good Intent has said no to you, eh?” she murmured, with that bewildering frankness which attached to her mother and herself. “Shame to come begging crumbs, when you wanted something better.”
She knew by his eyes that her guess was a true one, that he had come, inconstant as the wind, to find one playground when another was denied him. He was the same Reuben Gaunt who five years since had all but broken her courage and her heart. And, because he was the same, she felt the old love return, and let her reason go.
“Mother is vastly right at times, Reuben,” she said. “’Tis in our family to love a man o’er keenly, and to listen to his lies, and to go on caring all the more. There’s one thing puzzles me, all the same.”
He waited, perplexed as he often was by women’s moods, though by this time he ought to have known their every turn.
“Nay, only this, Reuben”—there was pathos in the quietness of the deep, strong voice—“I was young and unused to heartache when I found it first. I’m five years older, lad, and I’ve suffered and come through it. Seems it has taught me little. Seems I might as well be weaker than ye, instead of stronger. ’Tis a bit of a muddle, Reuben, this life o’ wind and sun and turmoil.”
David the Smith, meanwhile, was walking up the lane to Good Intent. He did not need to watch Yeoman Hirst well out of Garth before he stole into the fold, for he was welcome there at all times.
A desperate business David had on hand. He had thought much of Priscilla of the Good Intent during these last days; and this meant only that he had halted more often in his work of smithying or what not to wonder how the lass would best be made happy.
It was while he was sharpening a bill-hook on the grindstone in his smithy-yard that David had got his adventure well in hand.
“Never thought of that before,” he said, running his thumb along the blade. “I’m a rum chap enough, God knows; but, if it comes to a tussle ’twixt me and Reuben Gaunt—well, I’m stronger in the thews than he, and maybe I’m what ye call steadier-like.”