The hoof-beats sounded nearer now, and Rebecca’s stillness broke like thunder-weather. Forty years was cancelled. It was her own man coming, so she fancied. In a flash she went through the anguish of that far-off time—the dead lips making no answer to her kisses, the limp arms that would never again shield her from life’s tumults.
She dashed the tears away with a rough, skinny hand, and saw Causleen there.
“It’s not your fault, or the pedlar’s,” she snapped, old days and new mingling, with no gap between them—“but how dare he unfasten his pack and show me baby-wear?”
Causleen, young but tried by many footsore journeys, had learned insight into such moods as this. She understood the other’s wild clinging to past grief, as to a better thing than present joy.
“He did not know,” she pleaded softly.
“To be sure. He didn’t know. But he might as well have put a skewer through my heart.”
Then Rebecca forgot the girl. Standing straight to her lean height, she reached out her arms, and stood there calling to the man killed long since by the Lost Folk. She bade him come quickly, for she had wakened from a dream that he was dead—bade him step up and tarry no more—pretended he was here beside her, and closed her arms about the emptiness, crooning a girl’s love-welcome.
The slow pit-a-pat of hoofs had rounded the corner now, and Rebecca woke as from a trance.
“Get indoors, lass,” she said. “Dead men are no good sight for young eyes to see.”
Causleen answered nothing. She waited, sick with fear. Step by step the horse brought its burden nearer. There was no pride in her heart now, no memory of Hardcastle’s curt welcome—was it a few weeks ago, or years? She did not know—knew only that she would miss something that had come into her life to stay.