“There’s likely to be no quarrel, father--now,” said she. John Hirst sat brooding by the fire, long after Cilla had gone up to bed. He stepped out-of-doors, before locking up for the night, and looked at the shrouded moon, and tasted the cold of the whimpering breeze. “Cilla said somewhat of snow coming, a day or two gone by,” he muttered, “and Billy the Fool turned weather prophet, too, to-night. They’re apt to be right Billy and lile Cilla, and there’s a snarl and a tremor i’ the wind that I should know by now.” He did not confess so much to himself, but the superstition of those cradled by the weather was with him, and in the wind’s contrariness and spite he heard quiet omens of disaster to himself and those he loved. CHAPTER XIII Priscilla was not apt to lie awake nights for long. The keen air of the fells, the round of her daily work about the farm, forbade it. Yet, after she had talked with David Blake in the moon-dusk of Garth Street, had talked with her father afterwards beside the hearth, she could not sleep, for shame of the kiss that she had given to Reuben Gaunt, as they walked through fairy-land last night--bitter shame of the scene that Billy the Fool had shown her between the parted twigs of a bush wherein a nesting blackbird sat. She felt a great loneliness, an impulsive longing for the hand of David; she seemed to stand in a wood where all the trees were thick and heavy, and all the wonted tracks were lost. When at last she fell to sleep, dreams chased her. First David was laughing at her as he said farewell, and got aboard a ship with big, white sails. Then Reuben Gaunt was sinking in a moorland bog, and lifted his two hands in appeal to her, and she was crossing some stubborn waste of ling to reach him. Cilla of the Good Intent was little used to nightmares, and she was glad when at last the dawn stepped boldly into her room and roused her. Her first thought was of the farm, her second of the silence that lay about the house. The light which came through the casement seemed brighter, colder than a usual April dawn. There was no early challenge of the throstle, no sleepy call of a linnet, and such sounds of human life as came from the roadway were strangely muffled.