Cilla did not know her own voice; it was so eager, so impetuous. And she relied--and knew it, she who had been self-dependent until now--upon Billy the Fool. The lad’s face altered. Across the plump and childish flesh stray wrinkles crept, as circles widen on a pool when a stone is thrown into its waters. But Cilla, though she looked at him with frank, steadfast gaze, could not guess what was passing through his mind. So it would be with Billy until the mould lay heavy on his coffin; a love greater than Yeoman Hirst’s he had for Cilla, a love greater than David the Smith’s; but his thoughts were prisoned up in an unwieldy bulk of flesh, and to the end he would be Billy the Fool, Billy the Well-Beloved, just as the moor about Cilla and himself to-day would always be the moor, telling her secrets to none. “Well, now,” said Billy patiently, “I can find Mr. Reuben Gaunt for ye.” “Is he--is he hurt?” “Sound as ye or me. Hurt? Not the sort o’ man, he, to get into hurt. Slips through and about matters that might hurt him, like a snod trout when ye’re a-tickling of his underward parts in Eller Beck.” Cilla did not heed the lad’s veiled dislike of Gaunt. She was too glad to know that he was safe to care for aught else. “Tell me where to find him,” she said impatiently. “I’ll take ye straight to where he is,” answered Billy promptly, and set off down the slope. He led her into the fields below, then to a little dingle, all wooded in with thorns and slim, low hazel-shrubs. Not a word would he speak, though Priscilla asked him many questions by the way. Gaunt might be safe; but to the girl there was something uncanny in the natural’s silence. The wrinkles were graven deeper now in his face, and Cilla, glancing at him now and then, was awed by the look--fixed, inscrutable--in the lad’s eyes. “Chanced on him through coming to see a blackbird’s nest o’ mine,” he said at last, when they were nearing the dingle. “Had just pushed the twigs from together, and peered in, to find the hen-bird off her nest--and I happened, as Billy the Fool might say, to look beyond that same old tree o’ thorn, and down below I saw--” “Yes?” asked the girl, fretting under all this needless mystery. “What I’ll show ye, if so Mr. Reuben Gaunt be still there or thereabouts. Now, step ye pratly, Miss Priscilla, and keep your voice as low as any sparrow chirp; for the mother-bird may well be sitting again, and ’tis ill disturbing mated folk.” Whether it were guile or instinct on Billy’s part, none would ever know. He might have taken Cilla to twenty equal vantage grounds from which to look into the hollow; but he made for the thorn-bush, saw the bright eyes of the bird watching him, took infinite pains to part the branches a little to the right without disturbing her, then turned to Cilla.