"Well?" demanded Roddick, as Griff thrust his head in at the open window of the Wynyates parlour. "How does marriage go?"

"Like the weather, old man; soft, variable winds, no showers to speak of, and a touch of green showing everywhere."

"Come in, can't you? Why do you stand there with that perennial grin on your face, as if you were posing for a full-length portrait of the happy bridegroom? Away with you newly-married people!"

"Thanks," said Griff, striding over the low window-sill.

"You think the whole world must be looking through your rose-tinted spectacles. Wait till the glass gets smoked, and walk delicately in the meanwhile; you're not a degree higher than a cat on a glass-bottled wall, and if you go prancing along in this style——"

"You are in very good form this morning, Roddick. It does a man good to listen to your breadth of epithet."

"Breadth of epithet! Why talk like a book, Lomax? Call them swears, and have done with it. What have you come for?"

"To be congratulated. I couldn't miss your pretty way of putting things, so here I am, the very morning after my return."

"I suspect you want comfort," snarled Roddick. "I can give you that. There's a heap of fools in the same box with you, so you won't run a chance of feeling lonely. About how soon do you think of bolting for good and all?"

"Roddick, you're going a bit too far——" began Griff, hotly. But he caught a wicked light of satisfaction in the other's face, and made up his mind that he would not be guyed—"trailed," as they called it in Marshcotes—however much the amusement might give Roddick a vent for his ill-humour.

"I mostly am. Once I went very much too far, and—have some tobacco."

They smoked on in silence for awhile. Griff ventured a remark at length; his companion took no notice whatever, but went on frowning at the live peats in the grate.

"About that woman," said Roddick, finally.

"Which woman?"

"The thing you mistook for a vampire when you were last here. What did the pretty little beast do to you, Lomax, out there in the darkness?"

Griff shuddered; he had almost forgotten the incident under stress of the quick march of later events.

"She leaped out of the wind and rain like a storm-elf, and glued her flabby lips to mine, and called me 'Leo.'"

"Only that? You'd get used to it with practice," said Roddick, with a grim caricature of cheeriness; "one does to anything. Leo happens to be my own name, if you remember. On my soul, Lomax, I'm jealous! You've stolen one of the kisses that are my exclusive property. Gad, I've a mind to horsewhip you!"

Roddick was swung by passion into the very worst of his moods. All through this bitter levity ran a streak of blasphemy—a silent, strenuous blasphemy that was worse than any red-hot flow of words could have been.

"But who is she?" said his companion, gravely.

"Who is she?" Roddick's laugh burst out as if it had been half-strangled on its way to his mouth. "Innocent friend, who is a woman usually that prowls round one's doorway in the dark, and leaps into one's arms, and—the rest of it? The woman is my wife, of course."

Another dead silence. The first of the summer's bees forsook the white arabis that was coming into blossom under the parlour window, and flew into the room. Roddick watched it as it buzzed from wall to wall; then it wanted to escape, and made a dive for the upper window, banging itself against the glass.

"It's fun getting in, but how are you going to get out again, little fool?" muttered Roddick. He went to the window and squashed the bee flat against the glass; then returned to his place. "Lomax," he said quietly, "you'd better hear all about it; half a true story is worse than a whole lie. You want to know how this Venus became my cherished wife?"

"Oh, drop that tone, old man!" cried Griff. "You don't mean it, and it grinds at one's nerves horribly. Is she really your wife? From what I could see of her in the dark, she seemed too old—any age she might have been——"

"She's forty-five, as you are rude enough to call a lady's age in question," said Roddick, still in the same voice. "Drink has delicate fingers, you know, for modelling a woman's face, and she looks older. As to her being my wife, there is no question: she carries her marriage-lines like a talisman next to her breast. She brought the paper out, only a day or two ago, and asked me to gloat over it with her in Darby and Joan fashion; but you can understand that I find it rather difficult nowadays to play the rÔle of dutiful husband."

Griff had abandoned thought of interruption. It was frightful to listen to the man's cold-blooded rendering of his tragedy, but Roddick must tell his story in his own way, or not at all.

"We'll begin with the idyllic stage, Lomax, as you've rather a taste for sweetmeats. When I was twenty, and charmingly innocent, I went for a week's fishing in Devonshire. I put up at a little inn, a hundred miles from anywhere, and the landlord's daughter—who was scarcely innocent, I believe, at the moment she was born—took me in hand. You know what that means, when a young cub just let loose from school is flattered and fawned on by a woman five years his senior. The girl was passably pretty, too. Well, I came down again to the inn a few months later, and I was greeted with news—news, and tears, and entreaties from the girl that I would marry her. I was soft in those days—tender, you know—and I did marry her, more out of pity than anything else. I have never been tender since," he added, with a sudden deepening of his voice.

"Then—you were married all the five years we knew each other in town? Did Dereham, or any others of our set, know about it?"

"No, though I nearly blurted it out more than once, when they came to me with their doll's-house prettinesses about women. You thought you were a cynic, now and then, didn't you, Lomax, when the Ogilvie woman touched you up a bit too hard? Lord, I could have taught you a cynicism that grips your vitals! You'll never learn it now, so it's lucky you've struck into optimism—it fits you better."

"Never mind me, Roddick. Finish your story."

"Six months after I married my picturesque maid of the inn—the child died a day or two after its birth—she began to take opium for sleeplessness; she continued it as a luxury. From that she passed, with true catholicity, to wine, brandy, whisky—or, failing these, gin. She grew more beast-like every year, till now it's only the clothes and the walking on her hind legs that stamp her as a woman. Three times she has tried to kill me, and once—my cursed conscience won't let me do anything else—I have saved her from death."

"I thought you disclaimed tenderness just now," put in Griff, scarce knowing what to say. "In your place, I should have let her die."

"You wouldn't, when it came to the point," snapped Roddick. "We've most of us been murderers in theory, but it rings differently when it comes to practice. Not that tenderness has anything to do with it. I loathe her, and wish she were dead: it's my fool of a conscience, I tell you, that ought to have perished of ennui years ago. But neither will die; they're tough as nails, both the wife and the conscience. Wherever I go, I take the woman with me, like a monkey in a cage, with a nurse to look after her. When I lived in town, I planted my menagerie down in Hampstead; when I came here, I put her in a cottage as far in the heart of the moor as I could manage—she's there at this moment, unless she has given her nurse the slip again and come in search of me."

"And you see her often?"

"I have to," said Roddick, with bitter weariness; "sometimes it takes a strong pairs of arms to hold her. But her tantrums are the part of our married life I find the easiest to bear. She is not always mad, you know. She only tries to throttle me in and between whiles, by way of variety; at other times she loves me dearly, she fawns on me, she—— Never mind, Lomax; it makes me sick to talk of it."

"Poor old chap—poor old chap!" muttered Griff, vaguely. "Why the devil can't she die? A year or two of such a life would finish off any ordinary woman."

"Don't repeat that!" cried Roddick, sharply. "The next step is, what a fool I am not to kill her, and I kick ideas of that kind out of my mind before they get a chance."

"Roddick," said Griff—with a sudden glimpse of the reason that had brought his friend to this out-of-the-way moor—"Roddick, have you told me all?"

The other was silent for a space. His brows came together, overhanging his deep-sunken eyes like a jagged thatch.

"No, it is not all. When I said I had shelved tenderness, I lied. Dereham learned that end of my story, because he happened to know the girl's people."

Griff bethought him of Frender's Folly—of the coincidence between the coming of Laverack and the letting of Wynyates Hall—of the hint that Gabriel Hirst had once given him as to the distress of Laverack's daughter.

"The Laveracks, you mean?" he said bluntly.

"How did you guess that?"

"I remembered that you and they turned up almost together, that was all."

"Well, it doesn't signify, I suppose. You're not the man to gabble, are you, Lomax? I used to wonder at what you artistic people call illicit passions; close upon forty, with a wife who had taught me my lesson, it never occurred to me that I should be bothered by love. But Dereham took me one afternoon to the Laveracks'; why I went with him, the Lord only knows, hating tea-cup frippery as I did. Anyhow, I went, and Janet was there; you can piece the beginning together for yourself. The thing was as inevitable, Lomax, as thunder after lightning; we had been waiting all our lives for each other, and—there I go, slipping into the old, weather-beaten tags. A man can't touch love with words, any more than he can describe a sunrise."

"Did you strive against it?" The question was out and away before Griff could capture it. He was curious to know how a man of Roddick's stamp would behave under such an unexpected stress.

"Strive? No, you fool! It's the half-way people who flutter and beat their wings against the cage. A man either cuts the whole thing at once, or yields unconditionally. I yielded. Then Laverack got wind of it, and took the Folly in a hurry, and carried off Janet to the moors here."

Roddick got up from his chair, and began to pace about the room.

"Old man," he cried suddenly, "thank your God you have never had that to fight against—to live chained to a woman you loathe, and to know that a word will give you the love you crave for. And sometimes"—his voice sank to a whisper—"sometimes my little lady, in her innocence and passion, entreats me to take her away somewhere, and end it all. Then, Lomax, it is just hell."

Griff was driven to bay, as we all are when our friends force us to be helpless spectators of their distress.

"Do you remember the advice you once gave me—to cut and run, and snatch happiness while I could? A man, you say, doesn't beat his wings against the cage—but you are doing it," he said, impotently.

Roddick turned and blazed out on him.

"Do you know what that would mean for Janet? Do you know that I'd pawn my beggarly soul to save her little finger an ache?"

"Can't you get a divorce?" said Griff, breaking a long silence.

"No valid excuse, or shouldn't I have jumped at it? A woman may drink one's good name away and attempt one's life, and be faithful for all that. Drink comes under the sickness or health, richer or poorer, clause."

Griff also rose from his chair and fidgeted nervously up and down the floor.

"I'm off, Roddick," he said at last. "God help you, old fellow!"

Roddick grinned.

"I used to say that, but I had less experience then. You're not going to leave me yet. I'll saddle the grey, and we must have a gallop together. There's nothing like a horse for driving sanity into a man."

But all along the road, gallop, canter, or trot, Griff could not rid himself of the burden—

"If only the woman would die; if only the woman would die."