‘Good night, lassie,’ he said kindly.  ‘Do ye give ower distressin’ yeself.’

‘Good night, Mr. Garstin,’ she answered, in the same low, rapid voice in which she had given him her answer up on the fell.

‘We’re man an’ wife plighted now, are we not?’ he blurted timidly.

She held her face to his, and he kissed her on the cheek, clumsily.

VI

The next morning the frost had set in.  The sky was still clear and glittering:  the whitened fields sparkled in the chilly sunlight:  here and there, on high, distant peaks, gleamed dainty caps of snow.  All the week Anthony was to be busy at the fell-foot, wall-building against the coming of the winter storms:  the work was heavy, for he was single-handed, and the stone had to be fetched from off the fell-side.  Two or three times a day he led his rickety, lumbering cart along the lane that passed the vicarage gate, pausing on each journey to glance furtively up at the windows.  But he saw no sign of Rosa Blencarn; and, indeed, he felt no longing to see her:  he was grimly exultant over the remembrance of his wooing of her, and over the knowledge that she was his.  There glowed within him a stolid pride in himself:  he thought of the others who had courted her, and the means by which he had won her seemed to him a fine stroke of cleverness.

And so he refrained from any mention of the matter; relishing, as he worked, all alone, the days through, the consciousness of his secret triumph, and anticipating, with inward chucklings, the discomforted cackle of his mother’s female friends.  He foresaw without misgiving, her bitter opposition:  he felt himself strong; and his heart warmed towards the girl.  And when, at intervals, the brusque realization that, after all, he was to possess her swept over him, he gripped the stones, and swung them almost fiercely into their places.

All around him the white, empty fields seemed slumbering breathlessly.  The stillness stiffened the leafless trees.  The frosty air flicked his blood:  singing vigorously to himself he worked with a stubborn, unflagging resolution, methodically postponing, till the length of the wall should be completed, the announcement of his betrothal.

After his reticent, solitary fashion, he was very happy, reviewing his future prospects, with a plain and steady assurance, and, as the week-end approached, coming to ignore the irregularity of the whole business:  almost to assume, in the exaltation of his pride, that he had won her honestly; and to discard, stolidly, all thought of Luke Stock, of his relations with her, of the coming child that was to pass for his own.

And there were moments too, when, as he sauntered homewards through the dusk at the end of his day’s work, his heart grew full to overflowing of a rugged, superstitious gratitude towards God in Heaven who had granted his desires.

About three o’clock on the Saturday afternoon he finished the length of wall.  He went home, washed, shaved, put on his Sunday coat; and, avoiding the kitchen, where his mother sat knitting by the fireside, strode up to the vicarage.