Priscilla of the Good Intent: A Romance of the Grey FellsSutcliffe, Halliwell
General
Priscilla of the Good Intent: A Romance of the Grey Fells
Sutcliffe, Halliwell
Country life -- Fiction; Courtship -- Fiction; England, Northern -- Fiction; Farm life -- Fiction; Mate selection -- Fiction
She found no sheep; but, at the top of the highest brink-field she
halted for a moment to look out and up to the face of the bleak
high moors. The snow came sparingly now, the wind was falling, and
far behind Sharprise Hill a yellow light crept softly through the
snow-clouds.
At the wall-corner where Priscilla stood, three long pasture-fields
met at the common drinking-trough--a round, deep pool, fed by a spring
which bubbled up from the limestone at the bottom. One field of the
three was owned by Gaunt, and he, too, was seeking strayed ewes this
morning. They met face to face, he on one side of the pool, Cilla
on the other, and they were silent for awhile, embarrassed by their
memories of yesterday.
“A fit ending, eh, to sunshine and spring weather?” said Gaunt at last,
with bitterness and something near to self-contempt.
Cilla’s pride had come to her aid. The wild-rose colour was in her
cheeks, but her head was held high, and there was delicate scorn in the
frank glance with which she answered Reuben’s.
“You are not used to weather, as we stay-at-homes are. It is all in the
year’s work, Mr. Gaunt. To-morrow, or the next day after, we shall have
forgotten there was snow at all--unless we lose any of the lambs.”
Gaunt was not slow-witted, and he understood that Cilla had taken
firmer ground than he, and meant to stand on it hereafter. There was
to be no hint between them, such as he had implied just now, that they
had shared a day whose magic both regretted. He began to wonder if her
heart had been in the matter at all, and a wayward impulse came to him
to piece their broken love-tale together all afresh. Billy the Fool
came up the field behind them. David, as he carried a couple of lambs
to Good Intent, had met him in the roadway, and had suggested that
there was rare play-work to be done in helping Farmer Hirst with the
sheep.
“Never found such a game, I,” David had said, with his laugh that shook
the hills, “as setting a daft ewe over your shoulders, or carrying a
couple o’ lambkins i’ your arms. The sport might have been made for ye,
lad Billy.”
So Billy had sought the pastures; and he chuckled soberly, as he
scrunched through the snow, to think “what a terrible, queer notion
David had for lighting on a bit of frolic.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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