“Naught,” answered David stolidly. “They’re life, Priscilla, and maybe when we’re hid beneath the sward we’ll know of bonnier things--but not just yet, I’m thinking.” It was David’s moment, had he known it. It needed a touch, a glance, a right word spoken that should ring in tune with the spring; and while he halted there came a sound of whistling all across the mistal-yard. It was not like Farmer Hirst to turn back when once he had set off, and Priscilla wondered whose the footstep could be--the step that was quicker and lighter than her father’s. “One of the farm-men, maybe,” muttered David, remembering, now that the opportunity was like to be lost, the one right speech he should have whispered into Priscilla’s ear. “No--nor yet father’s. ’Tis a town-bred step, David. Cannot you hear the mincing tread, as if he thought the sweet yard-litter could hurt a body’s feet?” “Ay, now you name it, so I can. Treads nipperty-like, as a cat does. Mistrust that sort of going, I. Who can he be, Priscilla?” “Some stranger likely. Some one that’s never smelled the warmth of a cattle-byre, so I should say.” The footsteps sounded near and hurried now, but still there was that delicate, lady-like treading across what Priscilla had named the sweet yard-litter. David and the girl, looking from the shadows of the mistal into the open sunlight, saw a well-dressed figure of a man--a man neither short nor tall, neither dark nor fair--a man no way remarkable, unless the sun was full upon him, and, seeing him from a shadowed place, you noted the uncertain eyes which long ago had been a puzzle to his mother when he stood beside her knee. “There was no one at Good Intent, except old Martha,” said the newcomer, lifting his hat with an air which David Blake could not have copied had Priscilla’s love depended on it. “She told me you were here--‘likely,’ she added, in the queer speech I used to know, ‘seeing the roan cow was sick, and you were tending her.’ Priscilla, surely you’ve not forgotten me?” David Blake was the best-tempered man in all the long vale of Strathgarth, so folk said; but there were times when he was as ill to meet, as ill to look at, as if he had been a north-born dog, guarding a north-built threshold from a stranger he distrusted. And David listened to this prit-a-prat man who tried to mimick old Martha’s wholesome speech; and Priscilla, glancing sideways at the man who should have wooed her in the mistal--as women will glance toward a known lover from a rival known by instinct--Priscilla saw David Blake in a new guise, and one not pleasant to her on this peaceful day of spring. She smiled at the newcomer, inclining her head a little in the pretty, willowy fashion that Garth village loved. “You’ve the better of me,” she said. “I do not remember you at all. Stay, though,” she added, seeing the sunlight on his face, with its inscrutable, wild eyes, “I seem now to have known you long ago.”