“I somehow fancied ye’d come, Reuben,” she said, with as pleasant a glance of trust and welcome as though she were forty years younger, and he a lover bustling up with spring glamour in his eyes. “Well, it was this way, mother. You told me your man was to be off for a day’s holiday, and I thought there might be an odd job here and there--” “Just so,” put in the other, with a quiet laugh of content. “That’s why I knew ye’d be stepping up the fields.” There was a good deal to be done, as it chanced, and it was evening before all was finished. After they had supped together, Mrs. Mathewson led Reuben out into the croft and turned toward the moor. “We might as well enjoy the cool o’ the day, now we’ve earned it,” she said. Reuben glanced at her inquiringly. Her voice was gentler than he had known it; her shrewd grey eyes were soft and kindly as they met his own. It seemed that spring had touched her weather-beaten life with fingers light and tender. She was taking the track to Peggy’s grave, for all that; and Gaunt wondered why she chose just this one way to-night. “Oh, I laugh often at you folk who live smothered down in the valley yonder,” said the widow, turning for a glance at the dipping moor, the green pastures, the hills whose jagged tops were ruddy with the afterglow. “When ’tis cold, ye’re colder than us; when ’tis hot, ye’ve never a breath o’ clean moor-air to cool ye. I’d have died o’ my troubles long since, Reuben, if it hadn’t been for the moor.” With curious tenderness, she pointed out to him the landmarks, and named them all. Behind that spur of hill lay Dene hamlet. Just under the pole-star, showing bright green-blue in a strip of sky, stood the little farm where she had lived as a lass when Mathewson came courting her. The points of the compass were so many guides to memory--to memory, which is all the old folk have to warm them when spring calls up the pastures and demands an answer to his insolent, young note. She almost forgot her errand, in this love she had for the moor and the encircling hills. There was a story to tell of Heyward’s lass, who lived just where the pine wood showed dark below them in the evening light; of Daft Will, who lived under Sharprise yonder, and was the wildest and friendliest squire who ever rode the Strathgarth bridle-ways; of Bachelor Royd, who always said that he’d never cared to buy a wife by flattery, because pigs were easier come by and more profitable at the cost of open bargain in the market. And then she turned to him, still with the smile that smoothed out so many furrows from her tired old face. “All this is old wives’ talk!” she said. “I was allus a lile bit daft, like poor Peggy, but it heartens me to talk now and again o’ days gone by. Maybe they’d their own share o’ crosses an’ whimsies, yond old times, but they have a trick o’ smelling sweeter than the new days, Reuben.”