When Griff reached home and looked at himself in the glass, he was struck by the disarrangement of his features. The left eye was swollen and rapidly discolouring; his upper lip was pretty badly bruised; and a deepish cut in one cheek was still bleeding fitfully. These, and a few minor blemishes, helped to make up a picture that was far from prepossessing; it occurred to him that Kate would think it a bad start, if he appeared on the morrow in this guise. The more he thought of it, the more clearly he saw that he must get away from Marshcotes before the household was up, leaving a good-bye behind him. He stole out of his room and across the landing. A light shone under Mrs. Lomax's door, and he knocked gently.

"Come in!" called the old lady, who had long ago recognized his footfall on the stairs. She was sitting up in bed, with a thick shawl drawn close about her shoulders and a book on her knees.

"What! reading in the middle of the night? Fie, mother."

"I have been troubled lately, dear; it takes an old woman longer to reconcile herself to a change—do you understand? Why, Griff, what have you been doing to your face?"

"I don't look exactly pretty, do I? I've had a lively discussion touching the rights of property, and this is the outcome."

"Poaching again, boy?" sighed the mother. "I had hoped, since you came back—but, there, I might as well try to keep a duck from the water. Let me be doing something to your face, at any rate."

"No, don't bother. I'll get a slice of raw beef and paste it over the eye. I want you to do something else for me, though, mother."

"Well?"

"You have seen me like this before, but Kate hasn't. I was going to leave to-morrow in any case. If I pack my bag now and slip off by the early coach from Heathley, will you make matters right with Kate?"

"But where are you going?"

"Up to North Yorkshire. I had a letter from Framlingham the other day—you remember Framlingham?—he is playing the hermit up there in an out-of-the-way shooting-box of his, and he gave me carte blanche to run up when, and for as long as, I liked. After I leave him, I must put on my time as best I can until the divorce business is through. Mother, you will look after my wife? I hate to leave her. Strangeways may be up to mischief, you know. Don't let her go out alone, will you?"

The old lady smiled at him, very tenderly and a little ruefully.

"You are a muddle of a man, Griff; I sometimes wonder how you manage to come through things as well as you do. First, you rush off on a harum-skarum prank the night but one after taking big responsibilities on your shoulders; then, you come to me with all kinds of suggestions for taking care of Kate; finally, you will leave us in the lurch, us two poor women, to fight out a trying time together."

"I'll stay, mother! It was your suggestion, to start with, that I should——"

"You can't stay," said Mrs. Lomax, quietly.

"Well, but you seem——"

"Don't bother me with logic, when I am suffering from feelings. Off you go, boy; you can trust me with your treasure-trove. Don't forget to put the beef on your eye; you have no idea what a fright you look."

So Griff was well on his way north by the time that Kate had opened her eyes and had wondered anew at the strangeness of her surroundings. Mrs. Lomax contrived an explanation of her son's early departure, not without sundry concessions to her principles of honesty, and the two women began their dreary, uneventful waiting time. There were legal delays, first of all; and when at last the case had come on for trial, and Strangeways had obtained the verdict of the court, there was a further wait until the decree could be made absolute. The interval, indeed, was then only half what it is to-day, but to Kate, in her present condition of nervous dread, three months seemed a veritable eternity.

It was a wretched winter, too, for Gabriel Hirst. He was troubled, to begin with, by the difficulty of reconciling Griff's innocence with his action in carrying off Kate Strangeways to the Manor. Griff had given his word that they were innocent, and innocent therefore they must be—yet, "it looked queer to a plain man's way of thinking." Then, Greta was becoming positively vixenish; the preacher's helplessness, his dog-like devotion, his womanish beating about the bush, got on the poor lassie's nerves at last, till she was driven, from sheer inability to bear it any longer, to follow Griff's example and migrate for a while to an atmosphere less strained. She met Gabriel as she was lumbering across the square that fronted the Black Bull, in the one rickety chaise which Marshcotes possessed.

"How do you do, Mr. Hirst?" she said, leaning out of the window and beckoning him to approach.

The driver pulled up his nag—never a matter of serious difficulty—and Gabriel came to the door.

"Good morning; are you—are you leaving us?" he stammered, keeping the little gloved hand in his, for very forgetfulness of all that lay without the pretty, frost-kindled face, with its mocking lips.

"Yes, for a few weeks. It is so dull here, month in and month out, isn't it? Such a bother I had to get father to let me go—but aunt has begged me to stay with her for such a long while past, that I could hardly have got out of it this time. Do you never go away, Mr. Hirst?"

"I? Not often. I like the old place well enough, when——"

"Yes, when?"

"When folks treat a man as if he was something better than the mud under their high-heeled boots," said the preacher, with sudden savagery. This pretty scrap of womanhood, with her warm white flesh nestling cosily into her wraps—why did he let himself be driven by her out of his wonted sober courses? For a half-moment, the man of God could have strangled this mocking daughter of Eve.

"I never was treated in that way, so I can't tell; besides, my boots aren't high-heeled," she added inconsequently.

The driver was beating his hands across his chest to keep the cold out, and Greta bethought her of the coach.

"You'll make me late for the coach at Heathley, Mr. Hirst. Good-bye; won't it be a relief to you to have me out of the village? I tease you so, and I believe you don't half like it."

Gabriel Hirst stood there like a fool in the middle of the road, and watched the chaise disappear over the crest of the ill-paved street. Anger had gone from him; religion had gone from him; he was only dazedly conscious of that furry vision which had left him with a careless gibe. He never knew of the bitter tears shed by this same furry vision, who was really no more than a healthy young maiden, with all a life's desires before her; never guessed that she wept through half her journey, and wanted to weep out the other half, had there been tears enough to draw upon, and no one to see them fall.

Altogether, when Christmas Day came and the bells rang out their message, in the hearty country way, there was little responsive joy in the hearts of many of the dwellers by Marshcotes Moor. Mrs. Lomax, though every day seemed to bring Kate nearer to her, was as yet far from accepting the situation; she remembered other Christmases, when she had had Griff all to herself—further back, too, when her husband was alive, and they had framed great plans for the future of a certain toddling hopeful. Who was this strange woman, that she should upset a lifetime of hopes and fears, lightly as if they had been a card-house? And Kate felt her position keenly; she was soon to be branded in the eyes of all who knew her as a woman of bad repute, and it cut her pride to the quick. Then she would cease, for a whole day together, to care what any one thought of her, so long as she had Griff; but after that would come a bitter sense that he was far away from her, and a dread of what might happen in the interim. Like all superstitious people, she thought of Providence as an agent whose unalterable aim it was to defeat the plans of mortals when they were aiming for the highest happiness; it seemed inconceivable that nothing should step in to thwart them at the last. Griff was shooting—there was a whole crop of terrors to be gleaned from that knowledge alone; accidents were so easy, and the chance fall of a trigger was as simple an agent as Providence could well find. It was in vain that Mrs. Lomax, with her cheery common sense, strove to put such dreads away from her; and Griff's frequent letters—they came, if the truth must out, three times a week—did less to comfort Kate than one good, hearty hand-grip could have effected.

But there was more than theoretic dread abroad; there was real tragedy between Ling Crag Moor to the west and Cranshaw Moor to the east—as Roddick knew to his cost.

Roddick was shaving when the sound of the Marshcotes bells came through the frosty air on Christmas morn. He grinned savagely at his own reflection in the glass, and cut himself badly on the chin, under the delusion that he was uttering a biting sarcasm.

"Peace on earth," he muttered, as he sought for a cobweb on the well-lined walls of his bedroom. "Good-will towards men; I know the old tomfoolery by heart," he growled, applying the cobweb to his chin.

The old woman who came for a few hours each morning—his only servant—was planting a smoking coffee-pot on the table when he came downstairs.

"A merry Kirsmas, sir, to ye," she croaked.

"Thanks; the same to you," said Roddick, dryly. "Oh, by the way, isn't there some superstition about the season—something about coin of the realm, and other things that really touch people's hearts? Mrs. Whitaker, would you like a Christmas-box?"

He amused himself for a while, as his way was, in watching the old creature squirm from one embarrassment to another. First, she feared he would see how anxious she was in the matter, and then she feared he wouldn't; it was an unfair advantage, she felt, to take of a woman "that had allus had her own living to addle, but what war noan dependant on onybody's charity, for all that."

Roddick grew swiftly weary of her—weary, with one of his hot, insane frenzies. He tossed her a sovereign, as he would have thrown a bone to his dog, and turned to his eggs and bacon.

"That will do for to-day," he snapped. "You can leave as soon as your legs will carry you."

"But there's th' kitchen not fettled up yet, an' th' bedroom——" began the woman.

"Well, they must wait till to-morrow. I can't stand your clatter, clatter, clatter, upstairs and down. Heaven knows why it allowed man to hit on the notion of clogs!"

Mrs. Whitaker was not insensible to fear of her master's black moods; but it shocked her sense of decency that the domestic rites should go unperformed.

"Axing your pardon, sir, what'll you do for th' Kirsmas dinner? There's th' turkey to be roasted, an' th' sauce to be made, an' th' plum pudding——"

"Confound the lot of them! I shall dine off cheese and bread. Good day, Mrs. Whitaker."

The woman made off with what speed she could muster, realizing that Roddick was not all a God-fearing man should be, yet inclined—in the light of the golden sovereign clutched in her withered palm—to make allowance for the most sinful of masters on the blessed Christmas Day.

Roddick finished his breakfast, and pulled round his chair to the fire.

"Humph!" growled he, lighting his pipe. "Now we'll salute the happy morn, and be as jolly as we're bound to be. What a rum sort of place the world is!"

He read till twelve o'clock, and had just thrown down his book in disgust, when there came a knock at the outer door. His face brightened as he saw the wiry little man in velveteen who stood on the threshold.

"Oh, it's you, Riggs, is it? Come in. Have you got a message for me?"

"Yes, sir; from Miss Laverack. I'm to wait for an answer, sir."

Roddick jerked open the envelope, and ran his eye over the note. He tried to keep back any hint of the passion that warmed his blood at sight of the well-known handwriting; but the man in velveteen had not been a keeper for fifteen years without acquiring a quick eye.

"All right. I'll scribble an answer at once. What will you take, Riggs? Beer—whisky?"

He was not long in returning with his reply to the letter, and Riggs also left Wynyates with a well-defined feeling that Mr. Roddick came very seasonably.

"Only, what I fear is, that I'll be blabbing about the business to the wife one day," muttered the keeper; "and then it would be as good as all up with the young miss. What them two would do without a well-meaning, close-mouthed chap like me to help 'em, beats me. I wonder what's wrong with this Mr. Roddick, and why they can't make a clean breast of it to the Captain? It's plain to be seen they're over ears in love one with t'other; he's just got to that time of life, has Mr. Roddick, when it does take a man mortal hard if he once let's himself be collared. Well, well, there'll be a pretty reckoning between me and the Captain if ever my share in the game comes out."

As for Roddick, the brief message contained in Janet Laverack's note had altered his mood completely. "I begin to believe in the good-will nonsense," he said to his pipe. Even so short a spell of solitude as he had already tried had sufficed to induce the bad habit of talking aloud. He went and looked out of doors. "A fine day, too—just the sort of day one always reads about, but which doesn't usually turn up in practice. Every meeting means so much more sheer madness, but what of that? We'll make a good day of it, and leave the rest to the Providence I was kicking at a moment ago."

The ground was too slippery to encourage riding. He swallowed some food standing, and set off on foot at a brisk pace across Ling Crag Moor. Thence he gained Marshcotes Moor, struck into an ill-defined track that brought him out at Sorrowstones Spring, went a little way down the highroad at this point, and turned into the fields behind the Quarryman's Arms. Soon he was on the moor again, with frozen peat for a road, and sharp, dry air for stimulus.

On he strode till Lawfoot Water lay below him, with the reddening sun shimmering across the ice. Another turn, sharp to the right, past the further edge of the water, led him at the end of half an hour more to the crest of the ridge overlooking Frender's Folly.

Fifty years before, Luke Frender had ridden safely and well on the top of the rising trade-tide. When he sold his cotton-mill at Lutherton, and the business appertaining thereto, he was still a young man, with a taste for high living, and half a million sterling in the bank. Being a man of some imagination, and anxious to use his money in ways that had not occurred to his neighbours, he built himself a huge place in the very heart of the moors—not an ordinary square-built mansion with stuccoed walls, but a faithful imitation of the mediÆval. There is a spacious courtyard on the north side, with a fountain in the middle, guarded by four great stone dogs. Loop-holes grin from the castle walls, and at one corner the steps of an unbuilt tower climb up to the second-floor windows. The windows are long, narrow, deep-browed; and here and there crumbling warts of masonry are tacked on to the walls. As it stands to-day, blackened by fifty years of the wind and rain and frost that is no child's play in the heart of Cranshaw Moor, Castle Frender—better known to the neighbourhood as Frender's Folly—has a certain dignity of its own. If it be palpably an imitation, it is at least not jerry-built. Its walls are thick and well knit; its situation is harsh to the verge of terror; and the smooth lawns, the sweeping circle of carriage drive, the banked masses of rhododendron that climb the valley sides, serve only to accentuate the unshorn roughness that hems them in.

Nor is the Folly wanting in tradition of a sombre sort; short as its life has been, it has lived fast, just as its stones have greyed before their time. Luke Frender gambled away his money, his credit—his wife, too, some say—within its walls; and he shot himself in the big room overlooking the courtyard, which, half in mockery, he had built to serve as a private chapel. Then the friend who had robbed him of money and wife alike, lived on at the castle, and took to hard drinking, and died in raving delirium; his son, succeeding to the property, married one of his own housemaids, realized in a very brief time that he, too, had sold his honour to the devil, and avenged Luke Frender's end, in a fashion, by hanging himself to a beam in the same private chapel overlooking the great gateway and the courtyard. This was five years before Captain Laverack bought the place. Its history had become common talk throughout the countryside; prospective buyers shunned alike the grimness of its surroundings and the uncanny trend of its history, and Laverack had been able to buy it for a tithe of the amount which had originally been spent on the building. The shooting was excellent, and the situation exactly such a one as the Captain, in the present state of his domestic affairs, would have chosen before all others.

Roddick knew nothing of the story attaching to Frender's Folly, except that the building was almost of yesterday; yet now, as he looked down on that level circle of lawn and shrubbery, with the gloomy pile at its centre, he felt no whit disposed to gibe at the pretentiousness of what he had once termed the Cotton Castle. The sun, a crimson ball, was touching the moor-edge with its lower rim; a grey gloaming crept across the everlasting waste of heath; the wind sobbed piteously. A strip of green, a fringe of naked branches, a broad band of moor, were mirrored dimly in the big lake that stretched to the northern end of the valley. It was all inexpressibly lonesome, terrible beyond words.

The sun died wholly, while Roddick crept down the hill-side towards the trysting-place. He awoke from his sense of awe to find that his eyes were wet and his throat troubled. He cursed himself for a fool, but the pity had gripped his heart, for all that; the pathos that underlies all this bluster and wildness of the moors had struck to some inner sense, and made him womanish. He shivered as he stood beneath the grim old fir-tree that had found it hard work enough to stick to its post halfway up the hill-side. A sheep, away above him on the moor, bleated its half-witted protest against the fate that had set it there. If only a good, honest dog would give one good, honest bark, thought Roddick, he would not mind it half as much.

But the ungainly brute—half mastiff, half collie—that came creeping up towards the trysting-oak uttered no bark. He crouched close to Roddick's side, and wagged his rope of a tail, and smuggled his head into the man's hand for approbation; but he had been trained to hold his tongue, and he feared rebuke from the girl who followed him a few paces behind.

"Janet!"

No other word came to Roddick's lips. The tragedy, the desolation, the pathos,—they were all absorbed in that slim, girlish figure whose every line betokened eagerness. Wreck and ruin were chiselled deep into the stones below them; yearning that had no limits, aloofness that dared not seek for sympathy, were above them; but they two were close in each other's arms, and looked neither above nor below.

"Leo," she said at last, "was I foolish to drag you so far across the moor?"

"Be quiet, child!"

"I would have met you nearer Wynyates, but I could not get away for long enough. There is a crowd of people down there, dear, all expecting me to entertain them."

"Let them expect," muttered Roddick, gruffly.

As of old, he understood the folly of these meetings; the strain was greater than any sane man would subject himself to willingly.

"But I shall be missed if I stay here long, and I dread father finding us out; it would put an end to—to all the world, I think, Leo."

"Janet!" he said sharply.

"Yes?" She looked up, shocked by his tone.

"You shall not say those things. Do you know what it makes me ready to do—when you show your naked heart to me like that? It makes me tell myself that I have only to carry you away from all this to put an end to the struggle. You are such a flimsy weight, too; I could carry you with ease, whether you liked it or not, and then——"

He stopped. A supple strength came into the girl's figure—a strength one would not have expected from its slenderness.

"Leo," she said slowly, "I ask nothing better. I am not afraid to face it."

He hesitated—just for one half-moment. Then he shook her as if she had been a naughty child.

"You little fool! Who is afraid to face a danger that he does not understand? If ever you dare to try me as far as that again, I'll—— Good God, Janet!" he broke off, with irritable tenderness, "you mustn't cry. Can't you see that a man who wants to be—unselfish, you know, and nonsense of that kind—has to behave like a fiend incarnate. It's easy to be soft when you have not to keep the fight hot in you."

"Leo," said she, "if you don't kiss me at once, I shall hate you for ever.—Have you stopped to think," she went on, as if in apology for obtaining her demand, "to think what the life here means to me? I loathe the moors; they frighten me; it is all so dreary. And the people father brings to make things livelier for me, they only aggravate the loneliness. Leo, if I were one little bit more of a fool, I should either cry myself blind or—well, the lake is deep enough, and the cold would only be for the first minute or two."

Roddick's voice was in rags when he spoke.

"I'm a brute, child; why didn't you learn it in time?"

He took her to him, and petted her with a helpless mixture of the father and the lover that was infinitely pitiable.

"Leo," she whispered, looking up and smiling through her sobs, "is this our happy Christmas?"

Before Roddick could reply, the dog began to whine in a way that called for attention. He had his nose to the ground, and evidently scented something not to his liking. Then he was off like a rocket, and a dismal shriek came from a clump of heather just above them. The night was clear, with stars enough to show things in a sort of gloaming light. In the middle of the clump was a writhing mass of rags and dishevelled hair.

"My wife, by——! Janet, call off the dog and run back home. It is no place for you!" cried Roddick.

But Tramp was too excited to hear the girl's call. He was running round and round the figure, a stifled bark cutting into his growls now and then. Janet ran forward and gripped him by the collar—none too soon, for every moment he was on the point of making a spring. The figure got up out of the heather. Roddick cursed the light, because it was enough to show Janet the hideous contortions of the creature's face.

The silence grew unbearable.

"Well, what are you doing here?" demanded Roddick.

"Nay, Leo, you mustn't speak to me like that, when I've followed you, mile on mile, across the desolate places. Will you never learn what a true woman's love means?"

Janet winced cruelly. Roddick's eyes blazed as he watched the delicate girl shrink from this evil hag who was yet his wife.

"How often must I tell you to stay where you are bidden?" The effort to keep his hands off was trying him sorely.

"I can't obey when I'm drunk, Leo—I can't. I go wild for you, I—— Who's the white girl standing there?"

"Janet, go, I tell you! Go!"

She shook off the numbness that held her.

"I can't, I won't, leave you! Leo, are not your battles mine? How can I leave you to face—that?"

"Why didn't we let the dog do its work?" muttered Roddick.

Janet caught the words and gripped him by the arm.

"No, no—not that, Leo. That is what I meant—you will kill her if I leave you, and we should lose our chance of happiness, you and I, for ever. Oh, can't you see it? You who shook the breath out of my body because I asked you to take me away."

The creature glared from one to another and tried to speak, but Roddick checked her roughly.

"It is better to run away than commit murder," went on the girl, with eager persistence. "Will nothing make you understand, Leo?"

He pulled himself together.

"It is well to do neither, child. You can trust me."

"Will you swear to do—that thing—no harm?"

"Yes, I swear it. Now go."

She hesitated, glanced at the bundle of rags, then held up her face. He kissed it gravely.

"That is our protest, dear," she said.

He watched her out of sight. He turned to the wife of his bosom.

"Come along, you devil!" he said dispassionately.

Together they set off across the moor. Roddick laughed harshly from time to time.