Just now, indeed, it was his love of horseflesh that was talked of most in Garth. They said that his patrimony was rich, as a farming yeoman counted riches, but not enough to let him hand over the direction of his lands to a bailiff--as he had already done--while he himself rode idly up and down the countryside, or followed race-meetings. “Galloping to the devil, eh, as many a lad has done before him,” one would say to the other. “Ay. Seems like as a horse is the best thing God ever made--barring a good human-chap at his best,” the other would answer; “yet a horse is the devil and all when ye get a man o’er-fond of him.” Another whisper was abroad in Garth, one remote altogether from bankruptcy or horseflesh. They said that Priscilla of the Good Intent was not herself of late, that Reuben Gaunt was seen too often in her company. “Too good for the likes of you--eh, Silas Faweather?” one would say. “Aye, a mile and a half too good; but what’s to come has got to come, and lasses are mostly fools i’ the springtime of their life. Not just such fools, I take it, come later times, when the fairies’ pranks are over with, and bairns arrive, like, and a sackless husband still runs daft-wit, following what he calls his pleasure.” Cilla of the Good Intent knew her own mind as little, this mid April time, as Gaunt himself. The man’s plausible, deft homage when he met her; his seeming forgetfulness of the day when he had wanted her to marry him, and she had answered with a laugh; his low, quiet voice as he talked of glamoured countries far away--all these were fast making Reuben the centre of her thoughts. She missed him if he failed to come, though she might draw aloof and set a barrier between them when he did approach her. Yet David the Smith was about Garth Street each day, and his nearness, though she did not guess as much, steadied Priscilla. Beneath all else there was an assured and pleasant liking for David, a dependence on his judgment, a looking-out for him, as if her eyes needed shading against the glare of life, when troubles came too thickly on her. For this reason she seemed nowadays to play with Reuben Gaunt, though she was wondering only what her own heart had to say to her. News seldom travelled from Ghyll Farm to Garth. The house lay so far up on the border of the moor, and Widow Mathewson had discouraged intercourse so long, that you might have travelled through the village, and asked by the way for news of those at Ghyll, and yet have learned no tidings at the end of all. Had the widow been ill, or Peggy dying, days might well have passed before they knew in Garth what had chanced at the lone and churlish farmstead. So they guessed nothing nowadays of Reuben’s new infatuation for Peggy Mathewson; had they guessed it, Cilla of the Good Intent would have had a whisper, kindly and wholesome, dropped into her ear.