So David, with plain faith in plain strength of stronger thews and steadier morals, laid down the bill-hook, and bade his faithful comrade, Billy, to sleep on guard; and he strode along the quiet street of Garth, and turned into the lane that led to Good Intent.
He found Priscilla in the kitchen, her arms bared above her elbows. She was making a pigeon pie for Farmer Hirst, and David thought, as he saw her in the sunlight, that no man need ask for a bonnier sight than Garth could give him.
“I’ve something to say to ye, Priscilla,” was his greeting.
David could never do any business save in his own way. If he were driving a stake into the ground, he took up his mallet and hit it plumb; if he were asked to shoe a horse, he did not stay for talk, but brought the nag to reason soon as he could and clapped the shoe on it. So now he proposed, in great simplicity, to deal with this more desperate business.
“Something to say?” laughed Cilla of the Good Intent. “’Tis not often you have that, David.”
He did not heed. If he had spoken out like this at that gloaming tide when Priscilla had first waited for him to speak, when Gaunt had shadowed the mistal-door, it might have been better, or worse, for David; but now it was too late. “The time of day was behind him,” as they say in Garth, but he did not heed.
“Yes, I’ve something to say,” he went on doggedly. “When you were a lile slip of a lass, and when you were maiden-grown and proud, Priscilla, I loved you just the same. I’m busy to-day, Cilla, but I broke off to ask if you would wed me. Could aught be plainer, now?”
The girl rested her hands on the table, and looked at David Blake. She was silent, for surprise had given way to deeper feelings. It had been easy to disdain Reuben Gaunt, when he came wooing at a few weeks’ end; but David’s love was a thing to be reckoned with, a big, protecting force which had been about her for so long that it seemed fixed and righteous as Sharprise Hill—a part of this gracious world of Garth, a part of the comeliness and peace which brooded over its grey old fells, its grey and fragrant street.
Priscilla of the Good Intent had little in common with Peggy Mathewson; but they were alike in this, that each looked out at life with candour and with little coquetry.
Cilla glanced with troubled eyes at David—glanced wistfully and anxiously.