Cilla was still sitting by the hearth at Good Intent, and was still thinking of David’s letter, of the postscript which she understood so well. She was aware of a childish wonder that the message should have reached her with all its freshness after so long a sea voyage. The man’s unswerving loyalty, his dumb acceptance of any treatment she might give him, brought a pang of real suffering. She had no weight of remorse to battle with, as Gaunt had when he thought of the moorland grave; and yet, in spite of logic, she blamed herself. Overstrung as she was to-night, she could picture David’s return, the pathetic hopefulness that his new power of talking about foreign lands would bring him nearer to his desire, his ignorance that there was any bond between herself and Reuben Gaunt. “But then, there is none,” she would finish weakly, and would find little comfort in the thought, and the tears would fill her eyes once more, because David was so constant, and she so weak to help him. Cilla of the Good Intent stood in the middle of her own winter-tide, just as Garth village did; and the spring, as Billy had said, would seem long in coming. CHAPTER XXIV There’s no resisting Strathgarth Dale when her true spring arrives. She has many ambushes, many a sportive deceit, between winter and the breaking of the leaf-buds. It will please her mood to let woodbine leaf in March, to throw a wealth of saffron sunlight into sheltered corners of the fields, so that a man may sit and bask, and tell himself--knowing it a pleasant self-deceit, if he be bred in Strathgarth--that spring this year is coming early and is staying late. The next day a northwest gale will bring sleet and snow with it. And so through April--and half of May, perhaps--the weather teases folk, till their tempers grow brittle, and they hint darkly that it is a fool’s job to go on living in such bleak lands. Then suddenly the real spring comes, and the warm, keen joy of it, the eagerness of nesting birds and growing green-stuff, sweep memory of the winter’s bitterness away. It is spring and summer in one, this wonder-season that takes hold of Strathgarth Dale. The cattle, from sheer lust of life and liberty, throw foolish heads abroad and chase each other up and down the primrose pastures. Stern men unbend, and frail people grow frolicsome. It is sure, at this season of the leafing trees, that there’s no place else in which to live save the long dale of Garth. On one of these days Gaunt walked up to Ghyll Farm. All up the fields the cowslips curtsied to him, or primroses ventured maidish glances from their nooks. The larks rose high, and sang of courage and well-being. The plovers moved sedately, two by two, about the fields, and pretended, each pair of them, that the world did not know them at sight for nesting mates. A score of unconsidered flowers were budding eagerly. Reuben found Widow Mathewson at the gate of the croft, as if she looked for him.