As he neared the grindstone—standing by the wall-side like some old pensioner who knows his working past secure and thrives upon the after ease—he saw a light go shining out across the road from Widow Lister’s cottage. He saw, too, a plump, small figure of a woman standing at the door. Nanny Lister, it was said in Garth, would never go to bed till the last chance of a gossip had gone down the night, and she was holding to her reputation, so it seemed.
“Ah, ’tis ye, David!” she said, after peering out to learn who this late comer might be. “Well, ye’re just in time, for I’ve a grievance, and you’re the best-tempered man i’ Garth—”
“Am I?” laughed David, not sorry for this interruption to his thoughts.
“Well they say so, though I trust no man’s temper myself. Men have a trick of crazying about some lile slip of a lass or other, and I should know their tempers by this time, having lived with a husband and buried him.”
“Lister lies snug, Widow,” said David, with a touch of that lightness which Cilla had noticed in him throughout the evening. “Turfed over, he, and resting from the clack-clack of a tongue, eh?”
It was odd that the widow, old and ripish in experience, felt just as Cilla had done—that David showed comelier when he got a bright edge to his tongue. She bridled a little, to be sure; but that was only a return of youth, an instinct to stand off from and thwart a man when most she liked him.
“Unwedded folk should never talk to wedded ones, David. Maids and bachelors, I always did say, are like children playing wi’ dandelion-fluff, blowing to ask if ’tis this day, or next day, sometime, never, that the right lad’s going to come a-wooing. Well, he comes, and he isn’t so bright, after all, when ye’ve lived with him a year or two—but ye’re sort of fond of him and his foolishness—and ye put up with him, and bake his bread for him, and hearken to his whimsies when he comes home tired o’ nights and hugs the chimney-corner. That’s all a side o’ life ye’re deaf to, David, and I go pitying all ye stark, unwedded folk.”
David would have winced at another time; but to-night he had fought his battle, had decided once for all to give up Cilla and the grey village which she queened, and he was perilously gay.
“Give pity where ’tis asked, Widow,” he answered blithely. “I have the forge, for my part, and a quiet cottage to go home to, and a power o’ freedom ye wedded folk seem always to be missing. Did ye ever hear of the fox that got caught in a gin in Sharprise Wood and lost his tail, and went prating afterwards that he looked bonnier for the loss?”
“Ye’re very full of heart to-night, David. Pranksome, I should call ye.”