He halted when he came to the first stile. His pride was smarting; his love for Priscilla--which touched already the random good in him--was rendered barren for the moment by that one girl’s laugh of hers. Small wonder that this man--who, after all, was as God made him, and therefore to be pitied somewhat--had never caught the fancy of the forthright villagers of Garth. He was too big in his own eyes, too eager to see insult where only friendly raillery was meant; too heedless of the truth that the right word at the one right moment is more than lands and raiment. Reuben could not stand against a real insult, such as Farmer Hirst had given him just now; and he sat on the stile and nursed his wrath, and, like his namesake, he was unstable as the wind. He watched the patient fields, where the sunlight glistened on the clean, new blades of grass. Far up the pastures, a glint of limestone caught the sun and showed a track which, years ago, before he left Garth village, had been a wooing-trail for him. “I’ll go and see Ghyll Farm again,” he said, getting down from the stile. It was one of the big moments of Gaunt’s life, had he but known it. Yet he seemed to guess as little of it as the wind which, like himself, was turned by any hill that met it in its passage. He crossed the highroad, and climbed the further stile, and went up the track that led him to Ghyll Farm; and he whistled as he went, and moved with an eager step which folk, less versed in the ways of Reuben than the villagers of Garth, would have thought full of purpose. The farm stood high up on the rise where the pasture-fields ran into the moor and lost themselves, and Reuben, seeing the rough, black outline of it a half-mile ahead, began to think of other days. As if in answer to his thoughts, a big, strapping lass came up from the shallow dingle that cut the moor in two. She carried a basket of eggs on her arm, and she moved with a lithe, free swing that was almost insolent in its strength. Gaunt forgot Priscilla, forgot her father’s insult. The worse man in him stepped forth, triumphant and uncaring as the girl who came to meet him. “Why, ’tis you, Peggy?” said Gaunt, touching his cap, but not lifting it with the flourish which exasperated David the Smith. “Seems so, Reuben,” she answered, setting down her basket and standing with a hand on either shapely hip. It was not easy to read the look in Peggy’s face. There was derision, and rosy pleasure at the meeting, and defiance; and Reuben was daunted a little, for he liked women to go easily upon the rein. “I’m home again, you see,” he said, awkwardly. “Seems so. I heard you were back two weeks ago, and fancied you were overproud these days to visit Peggy Mathewson. Got a fine house of your own, and what not, now your folk are dead?” “I used not to be overproud to visit you,” said Reuben, his eyes catching fire at hers.