He woke from his dream, and gave the ewe a playful kick. “Look to your own married life,” he laughed, “as I am hoping to look to mine before the year is out.”
He glanced at the sun, and guessed that it was after four. Repentance and memory of Peggy Mathewson slipped from him. He strode down the fields; and, short-statured as he was, and slight of build, he carried a look of bigness with him. It was Reuben’s holiday, as it was Priscilla’s. The sun shone on him, just or unjust, and he stood apart from himself and his past, and felt that the good love and the strong love were his to ask and take.
Priscilla, waiting for the coach, and just five minutes before her time, as her wont was, was surprised by Gaunt’s straight, forthright air as he crossed the street of Keta’s Well. She had never seen him in the light with which this witching day of April glamoured all the land. Every man was better than he guessed to-day, and every woman comelier; and down the breeze played Puck the Sprite, laughing at all wayfarers as he laid the cobwebs on their eyes.
“How has your business sped, Cilla?” asked Reuben, lucky as he always was in being five minutes before his time, instead of five minutes after.
“Well,” she answered, lifting the eyes of truth to his. “And yours?”
“Well, also, Cilla. I have found what I came to Keta’s Well to seek.”
They plighted their troth—neither altogether understanding the long glance—there in the grey road of Keta’s Well. Reuben’s eyes caught honesty from Cilla’s, and she thought the mirror truthful; and, by and by, Will the Driver came thundering down the road.
“Up to time, in spite of women’s tongues,” he laughed, pulling up his team. “Lord help us drivers, Miss Priscilla, for we suffer much from women’s tongues. Widow Fletcher will be waiting for me, too, on the homeward road, if I know her, for ’tis her twice-a-day time to crack talk with Will the Driver.”
Gaunt spoke little on the homeward journey, and Priscilla was strangely silent, too. Passengers climbed up into the coach, or scrambled down, but these two heeded little of what went on about them. There were stoppages, at this hamlet and at that, to take up the mails which Will stuffed into the sack that grew bulkier and bulkier as they went along. From hill-top farmsteads lasses ran down, bareheaded and cleanly outlined against the background of the fells, to give Will another letter for his sack, or another parcel to be hidden underneath the box seat. All was life and movement on the Garth highroad, but two who travelled on it were thinking altogether of each other.
“I gathered these primrose blooms for you, Cilla,” said Reuben, breaking one of their long silences.