Tired and out of breath she halted to look about her. Again, like the horse, she sought for help—sought dumbly for it—when her own instincts were at fault.
“Good day to ye now. Te-he! Rare weather for the time o’ year,” came a voice at her elbow.
“Why, Billy, Billy, you startled me!”
“Wouldn’t do that—nay, not for a pipeful o’ baccy,” said Billy the Fool. “’Tis this way, as a body’s body might strive to put that same into plainish speech. I’d been peeping into a nest here, and a lile nest there, right up the pastures; and Fool Billy got to the moor, he did, and fancied he’d see if the peewits were a-laying on yond ancient ground o’ theirs up by Butter-grass Bogs. Then I sees ye—and, durn th’ odd button that’s left on my coat, Miss Priscilla, if I thought twice again o’ the peewits.”
Billy was always the courtier with Miss Good Intent; but she was too tired, too anxious, to give him more than a wan smile.
“Help me to find Mr. Gaunt,” she said. “His horse came to me just now, Billy, with no one in the saddle. He’s lying somewhere on the moor, and I cannot find him. You’re quick to find missing folk, they say, when they’re four-footed—well, find Mr. Gaunt for me.”
Cilla did not know her own voice; it was so eager, so impetuous. And she relied—and knew it, she who had been self-dependent until now—upon Billy the Fool.
The lad’s face altered. Across the plump and childish flesh stray wrinkles crept, as circles widen on a pool when a stone is thrown into its waters. But Cilla, though she looked at him with frank, steadfast gaze, could not guess what was passing through his mind. So it would be with Billy until the mould lay heavy on his coffin; a love greater than Yeoman Hirst’s he had for Cilla, a love greater than David the Smith’s; but his thoughts were prisoned up in an unwieldy bulk of flesh, and to the end he would be Billy the Fool, Billy the Well-Beloved, just as the moor about Cilla and himself to-day would always be the moor, telling her secrets to none.
“Well, now,” said Billy patiently, “I can find Mr. Reuben Gaunt for ye.”
“Is he—is he hurt?”