“It was good while it lasted.”
“Yet you want me, too, for enemy.”
“You’re of the Wilderness these days, Nita.”
“Was I, a moment since? You would laugh if I told you what I was weaving into my baskets, before you came and spoiled it all.”
Hardcastle’s face was grim as the nether-millstone. “I’m past your sort of guile, Nita. No woman takes me twice in the same net.”
“But was it guile? Suppose, as I threaded the withies in and out, I was thinking of Logie—and its Master?”
“And of twenty other men, no doubt.”
He had struck home at last. She got to her feet, shaken by a storm of passion. “Fancies are no crime. I’d have lost every man in the dale for sake of Hardcastle of Logie—aye, and have burned their houses at a word from him.”
Hardcastle felt a touch of her old, bewildering power, but recovered sharply. “You had me at call once, and tore that dream to tatters.”
“You were too much at call. I’m of the sort that wearies unless a man’s escaping me.”