“The vision came,” she went on, with great simplicity. “I did not ask for it. It came.”
Hardcastle’s heart beat faster, for no reason that he knew of. Since Causleen’s first coming there had been recurring enmity between them broken by little rifts that let the sunlight through. He had not known till lately how he had begun to need and seek her comradeship. To-night he gained a deeper knowledge. Her welcome at the gate was the one thing he had craved, all the long way from Garsykes, and it was his.
“You’re glad I’m home again?”
She grew still and cold. “Glad? Yes. You have been kind to us—two pedlars tramping to your gate. The vision came, and I spent myself in sending help to you across the waste—help of the spirit—and, of course you’ll laugh at fancies—I spent myself, not for your sake, but because you’d shown us kindness—of your own rough sort. I wished to pay a debt.”
Logie’s Master had known mixed weather on the uplands, but never such a March-tide change from sun to bitter, east-wind spite. The pedlar’s girl was remote from him as the top of old Pengables Hill, with its head among the driving sleet.
“Is it Nita,” he asked clumsily, “and her chatter of the night we spent down yonder?”
“It is Nita.”
The man’s big, simple heart found room at last. Through these last weeks he had been groping forward to the light.
“Best marry me,” he said. “I’ve wanted it, Causleen.”
She answered nothing for awhile. Then sleet came stinging at his face again.