“Tell Cilla”--she could almost hear the man’s slow voice speaking to her from away in Canada--“tell Cilla I’ve seen a deal that she used to want to see, what she called ‘all beyond Garth hills.’ I can tell her about strange lands now, if I can bring my slow tongue to it. Maybe she’ll find me polished up a bit, not just so sleepy, like. And anyway, if she’s free, it stands to sense I haven’t changed, any more than I’ve altered i’ my wish to see Garth village again.” That was all; but the message brought many memories to Priscilla. It painted for her every joy, and heartache, each bewilderment, that had followed Reuben Gaunt’s return to Garth last spring. She remembered how Reuben had first caught her fancy by talk of “all beyond Garth hills”; she recalled David’s dogged persistence in his faith that the old homeland was better than the new countries he had never seen, his jealousy of Gaunt’s glib speech and wider experience. So much had been possible to David then, if only he had known it; he could have pitted his strength and sturdiness against the other’s debonair persuasiveness; he might have appealed to the trust and comradeship that had held between them since the days when she was a lass in pinafores, and David a hulking lad of twenty who had eyes for no one else. Yet Cilla knew that it could never have been. In some instinctive way, without thinking it in so many words, she knew that David was not meant to have a wife of his own and--and all that followed, if God willed. Looking into the sleepy peat-glow, Cilla sat aloof for a moment from her own perplexities. She saw David clearly, as we seldom find opportunity or leisure to view our neighbours, saw him with the grey, soft light of renunciation about him. It was David who had made Billy the Fool a working member of the busy hive at Garth, simply by persuading him that work was play. It was David who had mended Widow Lister’s clocks, and bird cages, and window-fasteners, long after the patience of other men had been exhausted. It was David who loved Garth, and all Garth’s ways, and all Garth’s frets and whimsies, who had gone overseas to help a kinswoman in fanciful distress. Cilla turned to the letter, and read the postscript again; and she was surprised when her father, rising with great noise from the hooded chair opposite, told her she was crying. He patted her roughly on her head, as if she were a sheep-dog, and stamped up and down the room, and returned to ask her what was the matter. “Nothing, father, nothing. I’m tired of this snow, maybe--” “Well, then, I’ll just go and tell Garth folk that David’s coming back. They’ll like to hear it,” said Hirst, who, like all men, had a secret cupboard where he hid his one, favourite cowardice. “Could never abide tears myself, lile Cilla. Live and let live, I allus did say. Men were made for work, and they’d best leave women alone while tears are brewing up.”