She closed the porch-door behind her and stepped out into the sunlight. “’Twill be enough for me if I keep _your_ eyes fro’ roaming for a whole day at a stretch. Eh, well, I’m a fool to go wi’ ye, and mother ’ull wonder what’s getten me when she comes back fro’ selling eggs i’ Garth. But then she’s used to wondering, is mother,” the girl added, with a sudden, hard wistfulness in her voice; “it seems to come natural to us Mathewsons.” As they breasted the moor, however, Peggy’s spirits rose. She had a day’s freedom before her--and Reuben’s company--and there was no need to vex herself with the question why he, and he alone, had power to take her natural good sense away. They followed one of those winding moor-roads, set between low banks of bilberry and ling and wild thyme, which seem ever to hide some swift adventure at the next turning. Peggy, bred in the midst of these wide, sweeping uplands, had found all her childish fairy-tales, all her make-believe of battle and romance, among the moors. The gypsy wildness in her needed colour, warmth, the speed of strange adventures; as a child, and later as a woman, she had peopled the heath with voices other than the curlew’s and the plover’s. The countless hollows, bottomed by rank mosses and deep bracken, hid ambushed men; behind each hillock that concealed the track from her, she would look for some figure to come riding down to meet her, and no toil about the farm, no harshness of the workaday life which hemmed her in at Ghyll, had killed this glamour of the heath. It was this need of glamour, maybe, which had bidden her long ago to set her heart on Gaunt; the man’s queer eyes, with the look in them of devilry and yet of boyish surprise at life, his irresolution, the very uncertainty from one day to the next whether he would come tame to her hand, or would be wooing elsewhere, all enticed Peggy, as the winding hill-tracks did, that promised some gallant meeting at the next corner--always at the next corner. To-day she looked neither forward nor behind. She crossed the moor with feet as light as Gaunt’s, and he laughed when they reached the top and halted to take breath. “You’re just a wild moor-bird, Peggy.” “And why not, Reuben; I was hatched in a moor-nest.” The day’s heat had brought its own recompense in a measure, for a haze was creeping up from the heath, softening the glare. The breeze was quick up here, and almost cool. Far down below them they could see Linsall village and its bridge, resting like a small, grey Paradise in the cup of the tall hills. “You were hatched in the pastures,” went on Widow Mathewson’s lass, after a silence. “There’s a difference always ’twixt moor nestlings and pasture birds.” “Oh, I don’t know! I’m fond o’ the moor, myself--”