Once, as he watched them, they stopped, came closer still together, and went on again; and over David--whom folk thought slow and cheery, not given to feeling overmuch--there passed the bitterness of death. It was no selfish love he had for Cilla. To see any man so close to the lile lass, whom he had watched over so long, would have been a grief, because he frankly sought her for himself these days; but had the man been honest, clean of his hands, David would have felt no bitterness, only a self-sorrow that he would not have nursed for long, because such sickliness was foreign to him. “If’t had been any one but Gaunt,” he said, “any one in all Garth village save Reuben Gaunt! Lord knows I hate the willowy slim way of the man, and he’ll send Priscilla’s happiness abroad--ay, will he, like any ladkin blowing bubbles for a frolic on his mother’s doorstep.” He turned away, and he thought that he could not bear to go to Good Intent to-night. Yet he had promised, and David’s word, till now, had been good as Queen’s coin in Garth village. Up and down the fields he wandered. If Cilla were not sure to meet him at Good Intent, he could have gone at once, and covered up his bitterness from Farmer Hirst as best he might; but it was nearing dark, and he knew that she would return before the last of nightfall came. “I cannot bear to see the lile good lass, and never speak a warning word!” he cried. Out of the silence presently there came a cry--Priscilla’s call to Gaunt, in token that she had crossed the home-croft in safety--and David bent an ear and listened. “Only a daft old barn-owl,” he muttered. “Birds and their ways, and maids and their ways--I’m weary of ’em.” David was unlike himself, and knew it. It was well for growing lads to be peevish at these times, but he was old enough, he had fancied, to have learned some common sense. So he squared his shoulders; and his face, in the gathering dusk, wore the look he had when he was driving a stake into the ground or was hammering a horseshoe on the anvil. “I’ll go,” he said. “Promises run down the wind, they say, and catch in any hedgerow--but not David’s promises to Farmer Hirst. Bless me, and there’s a letter in my pocket all the while, and I’d forgotten it!” He set out in earnest this time for Good Intent, not heeding the beauty of the grey night; and he came to the wicket-gate that opened on the garden at the rear of the farmstead, and went down the five steps leading to the door, and knocked. “Step in, David!” sounded Hirst’s big voice. “I knew you’d come, lad, though I said you wouldn’t.”