“Hark ye,” said Mrs. Mathewson, “there’s Peggy’s parson come to say a prayer or two above her. He’s constant, like, yond bird; she had him so tame, ye’ll mind, that he’d eat from her hand, and he never went south this winter, like most of his mates. He just comes drifting down each night, like a lost bairn seeking home, and says his prayers, and then goes lap-winging up the moor again. There, we’ll be getting home, Reuben. ’Tis a grand night for two together, if they happen to be springtime-young; but ye’re tired of an old woman’s chatter by this time.” When they reached the porch, Gaunt stooped and kissed her awkwardly. Such tokens were rare between them, and his feeling was always one of shyness, as if he feared reproof. “You’ve been kind to me to-night, mother,” he said. “Well, I’ve a right to be. Take a breath o’ common sense down fro’ the moor to the valley lands, and quit thinking o’ last year’s nests. Good night, Reuben. I’m fancying lile Miss Cilla will not choose so far wide o’ the mark, after all.” She stood at the porch-door long after he had gone. She was jealous no longer on Peggy’s behalf. A great weariness had come to her--tiredness of all things under this warm, soft sky, with its stars and its silent peace. She had paid her debt to Gaunt. Her knowledge of all he had done for her, when none but he came up to help her through the fever-time, had stood to Widow Mathewson as a debt, and she had always had a liking for meeting creditors. Peggy lay under the rowan, with the quiet of the lapwing’s evensong above her. Reuben was striding down the fields, lusty and long to live. But this woman, standing at the porch, was empty of all courage. “Spring blows warm to the young,” was her thought. “’Tis only right it should--but what of the old, sapless folk?” She sighed, and laughed at herself the next moment, and answered her own question. “Not so sapless, after all,” she said, in her brisk, tart voice as she turned indoors. “There’s a farm to look after, and a lazy farm-lad to get up betimes to-morrow’s morn.” Gaunt, meanwhile, had got down the fields as far as the foot-bridge that decides a man whether he shall cross to Garth, or turn to the right and seek the road which leads Marshlands way. Gaunt chose the left-hand track, over the slender arch of stone. “I’ll go by way o’ Garth,” he said to himself. “The longest way round is pleasant on a night like this.” The longest way round led him past Good Intent, and a big voice sounded from the porch as he neared it. “Ye’ll have a rare fine day for your journey, Cilla,” Hirst was saying, taking all the parish into his confidence, though he thought his tone subdued. “I never saw a likelier sundown.” Gaunt stopped. A senseless lover’s dread had seized him. Cilla going a journey? Had his hopes been all so much idleness? A journey meant travelling overseas, surely--and David was in Canada--and there had always been a friendship between them.