“Aye, and beyond.”
She fell to crying; and, when that did not serve, she glanced at him through long, wet lashes. “If I cared for too many men—it was vanity, and no more. There was never a man but you.”
Wrath came to Hardcastle—sudden, heedless tempest, like a north wind from far, broken hills. “I’ll not say to any woman what’s on my tongue for you. I gave you—all Logie and myself—gave you my heart to be held, or played with. Tales came of other men, and I laughed at them—till I found them true.”
“It was vanity. No man but you ever took my lips—though many wanted to.”
She was weaving gossamer about him, this once again. Charm of the slender body, supple as the willows she wove into her baskets—lilt of her voice—the pleading in her eyes—were meshing him into her net.
He broke through. The new days had hardened him. Up yonder was threatened Logie; and here was Nita of the Wilderness, wanting him not for himself, but because he was the one man in the country-side she could not play with.
“You were singing a song to Widow Mathison’s brat,” he said.
“The feud with Logie’s up again. It came out of the olden days, before I knew.”
“Teach him a newer song. There’ll be no Garsykes when the lad grows up.”
Wrath had left him. Gruff and cold, sinewy with field-sports and hard riding, he would never again be the lover she had known. He was in the thick of peril, and seemed to have no fear. He was within reach of her hands and lips, and would not take them. And now fury came to her in turn, though it ran deep and out of sight.