“My father is going abroad at once,” she answered.
“Abroad?” he repeated. He had a branch of bramble in his hand, plucked for the crimson of its leafage. He drew it through his hands and the thorns bled the palms, but he never felt the pain. She was going too! She was going away from Maam! He might never see her again! These late days of tryst and happiness in the woods and on the hills were to be at an end, and he was again to be quite alone among his sheep with no voice to think on expectantly in slow-passing forenoons, and no light to shine like a friendly eye from Maam in evening dusks!
“Well,” she said, looking curiously at him. “My father is going abroad, have you heard?”
“I have not,” he answered; and she was relieved, for in that case he had not learned the full ignominy of her story.
“Can you not say so little as ‘good luck’ to us?” she asked in her lightest manner.
“You—you are going with him, then?” said Gilian, and he delighted in the sharp torture of the thorns that bled his hands.
“No,” she answered, “it’s worse than that, for I stay. You have not heard? Then you are the only one in the parish, I am sure, so ignorant of my poor business. They’re—they’re looking for a man for me. Is it not a pretty thing, Gilian?” She laughed with a bitterness that shocked him. “Is it not a pretty thing, Gilian?” she went on. “I’m wondering they did not lead me on a halter round the country and take the best offer at a fair I It was throwing away good chances to give me to the first offerer, was it not, Gilian?”
“Who is it?” he asked, every nerve jarring at the story.
“Do you think I would ask?” she said sharply. “It does not matter who it is; and it is the last thing I would like to know, for then I would know who knew my price in the market.”
“Your father would never do it!”