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 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.”

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