Gaunt had opened the gate, and Cilla and he were loitering down the lane which once had been the highway, but which now was grazed by sheep and cattle. There was a curious privacy about this abandoned road, a charm which haunts neglected thoroughfares. The raking fells lay white against the sky on one hand; on the other lambs bleated to their mothers in the sheltered hollows. The birds could not be quiet, and a happy din went up into the sunshine and the warmth. The lark sang “like as if he’d burst his lile throat all to pieces,” as Billy put it, and the throstle piped, high and clear, as if he meant to be obeyed, and the curlews were dipping and wailing, wailing and dipping, with their note of everlasting sorrow. A hare got up from under their feet. A squirrel peeped at them from the bough of a leafing sycamore. Men had been busy once along this green, neglected lane; and the fret of their tired feet had passed, and the mother of us all had chosen this for her quiet house, where birds might nest, and flowers could bloom, and men’s insolence was hidden out of sight. If ever two folk were given the one right day and the one right place for wooing, Gaunt and Cilla were favoured now. The peace of the lane, the eagerness of all the teeming life about them, the very fell-tops, pointing with white fingers to the blue and happy sky, seemed made for them; and Cilla was proving once again the truth of the Garth saying that “Miss Good Intent could always have the Queen’s weather for the asking.” A year ago they had trodden the same lane as boy and girl, had kissed, and fancied life held nothing better. They had seen life face to face since then, had lived through long, ugly days that seemed too sordid for romance; yet here was the glamour, walking step by step with them, a glamour that was built, not on the sands of fancy, but on foundations sure as those of the sturdy hills about them. Gaunt turned to look at Cilla. She was dainty in her lilac frock. Any man, passing her, would have halted for a second glance at this lass whom Strathgarth summers had treated kindly, whom Strathgarth winters had given a reliance unknown to folk bred amid softer climates. He scarcely knew the face of which he had dreamed of nights; its peace, and its tender, eager beauty, were borrowed from all that lay beyond Garth hills, and from all that lay within them. They came to the bend of the lane where last year they had met Peggy o’ Mathewson’s, and Cilla halted for a moment. “Poor Peggy,” she murmured, generous and warm of sympathy as this day of spring that set the world to rights. “It was never meant to be,” said Reuben, with no assurance in his tone, but rather like a child who gropes helplessly for the answer to a riddle. And Cilla smiled through her tears. “My dear, it was never meant to be. Reuben, there’s a lile bird singing at my heart. I can’t mistake the song.” “No wonder they called it Fairy’s Lane,” said Reuben. “I used to laugh at the notion once.”