Could David have left his forge more often, in order to seek Priscilla’s company--and he was well-found already in the bread and cheese of life, and knew that there were savings of the years behind him--could David have understood that a maid, if you love her and she chances to love you, needs wooing with a desperate seriousness and a desperate gaiety--he would have been less interested to-day in the making of charred posts wherewith to furnish forth John Hirst’s turkey-pen. Priscilla, meanwhile, was wandering up the bridle-track with Reuben Gaunt, and the little, plain-featured man with the wild eyes was talking to her--talk being his prime work in life--and telling her of the countries he had seen, the busy streets, the things remote from Garth’s quiet highroad, and Garth’s quiet hill-slopes where the work of farming life was done. Like cloud-land drifting before a merry wind, the old life went receding from Priscilla of the Good Intent. The street of Garth grew dull; the singing of a farm-hand, as he strode up the hilly field in front of them, was so much noise in a rustic bauble-shop. Reuben Gaunt’s plain face, his little body, receded too, and only his wild eyes were left--the eyes that looked into hers and reflected, so she thought, the world beyond Garth village. Billy the Fool, had he been in this quiet lane, would have been finding the first wild-strawberry bloom, or another blackbird’s nest; but Priscilla, who had loved such things aforetime, was looking far beyond them now. “You had seen so many countries, and there were more to see. Yet you return to Garth,” said Priscilla suddenly. They had halted at the gate that opened on the field-track to Good Intent, and the girl was leaning with her arms upon the topmost bar. The long and quiet glance she gave her companion was childish in its wonderment. “Yes--to stay, I doubt. ’Tis free and pleasant to go roaming; but a man grows tired of earning his bread as best he can. I’ve been a jockey, a trainer, a gold-miner--a publican, Lord help me, for one whole year--and all seemed to leave me as poor as it found me, Priscilla.” It was a little sign of the new days, but a clear one, that the girl’s pride was content with his half-tender, half-easy use of her name. She did not call him Mr. Gaunt, but avoided any name when speaking to him. “But you had the life--the life.” Her voice was almost passionate. “You did not see the same hills every day, and churn the butter whenever Thursday came, and milk the cattle o’ nights and mornings, from spring’s beginning to winter’s end.” “No, Cilla--yet, somehow, when the old folk died and left me Marshlands, and word came to me that the snug property was mine, I longed for the home-fields--longed to settle down.”