“There’s not much ghost about me,” laughed David, as he gripped the other’s hand with old-time strength. “Well, no, if a grip like a pair o’ pincers be aught to go by. Stand ye there, David, and let me take a square look at ye. I’ve never been better pleased to see a man i’ my life.” He walked around his friend, as if he were a specimen of farm stock whose points he was anxious to appraise correctly. Then he gave a great roar of approbation. “Thought spring was treating me well when the ewes twinned so grandly, and scarce a lamb lost; but there was better to come, ’twould seem. David, ye’ll have to stay i’ Garth. ’Tis a different place without ye.” David looked around him--at the pastures, full of the music of lambing-time, at the rough-built walls that traced a grey, irregular pattern across the green face of the land, at the spinneys and outlying barns which were so many landmarks to remembrance. Then he leaned his arms on the gate, and gave a quiet laugh. “Oh, I’m here to stay,” he said. “The months have been years to me out yonder. It will take a lot to ’tice me out o’ Strathgarth Dale again.” “So what of all those traveller’s tales ye promised Cilla? I tell ye, David, she looks for livelier doings than ever she saw at home.” “Oh, I’ve tales enough, maybe. ’Tis a different life, but--” “But naught so much to brag of?” put in Hirst “There! That’s just what I always said.” “The life’s well enough for those it suits, but it’s over-young for me.” David picked up a straw and chewed it with a pleasant sense of leisure. “’Tis this way, if I can get my tongue round a plain meaning. I’m ready to do a day’s work with any man; but, when it’s done, I like old things about me, th’ old grindstone at the corner, Widow Lister’s bit of a garden-front, with its daisies, and London pride, and lile clumps o’ primroses. I want to be near all that my father loved, and his father afore him and back to Flodden Field, or near thereby. Out yonder ’tis naught but looking forrard and hurrying. They’ll come to our way o’ thinking by and by, when their roots have taken deeper hold; and they’ll do more work i’ the year, though they tell ye otherwise.” This was the David who had left the homeland. Unwavering in his love for Strathgarth, quick to realize a new phase of life, yet slow to accept it, he returned unspoiled, a little surer of his faith, if that could be, in the righteousness of older lands and older way. “Your aunt Joanna didn’t treat ye very well,” said Hirst, after one of the pleasant silences that long ago had helped to make the two men friends. “It puzzles me that ye bear no malice, like.” “She’s as God made her, like all of us. There’s lile use in going against handiwork o’ that sort. She asked me to go, and I went; and, when she hadn’t a use for me, I came back.” He stooped to pick a fresh straw, and again laughed gently. “’Tis as simple as falling out of a tree, and no back reckonings either way, now I’m free to live i’ Garth again.”