The village natural, with his huge body and his big, child’s eyes, had a way of finding out his neighbours’ secrets, and had no shame at all in telling folk what each wanted to hide from the other. Priscilla turned her face away, and David reddened like a lovesick lad.
“Keep the forge-fire going quietly,” said the blacksmith. “That’s idleness for ye—just to lie dreaming this side of it, and time and time to put the fuel on.”
“Ay, that’s idleness,” said Billy, as he stretched himself—again like a shaggy, trusty dog—along the smithy floor. “Get ye to work, David, and leave me to my play-work.”
They went out into the springtime, David and Priscilla, and the breeze was cool and sweet about them as if it blew from beds of primroses. The lass wished that David Blake had more to say, wished that the quickness of the spring would run off his tongue’s end; she did not know that he felt it—more than she, maybe—but had no words in which to tell her of it.
“You make a body thoughtless-like, Priscilla,” he said at last. “Never asked ye what the job was I was wanted for; and here I am without a tool to my back.”
David was able to do so many jobs, and do them handily, that it might be one of twenty that was asked of him to-day, and he looked anxiously at Priscilla, to ask if he should go back for his tools.
“I was watching the water-wagtails,” she answered, scarcely hearing him. “They’re home to the old stream again, David, and that means the spring is here, or hereabouts.”
He watched the pair of mating birds sit, first on the low stone wall that guarded the stream, then flicker to the road, their white tails moving like a lady’s fan.
“Mating-time, Priscilla,” said he.
Something in his voice, something in the true, quiet ring of it moved Priscilla strangely.