"Stay, lad!" shouted the Squire, as Lassie was breaking into a trot. "A piece of parting advice. Ride straight, drink level, never repent of your sins, and die as I find you--a jolly good fellow. Good-bye." Late that evening, when Kate had left him alone with the mother, Griff summoned up all his courage and blurted out what had been the trend of his morning's business. "I have bought Gorsthwaite Hall, mother." She looked up sharply at him. "So it has come at last, Griff? I feared it would, some day--but scarcely as soon as this." "Now, old lady, don't be foolish about it. Do you want it to be said that I beat you in the matter of common sense? Kate and I must leave you sooner or later." She fell into an obstinate silence, her face averted from her son's; it seemed as if she heard nothing of his fragmentary explanations. Then, at last-- "It is I who ought to leave. The Manor is yours, not mine." "Mother, how can you!" He knelt at her feet, and took her hands, and tried to force her eyes to meet his. But she would neither look at him nor suffer his endearments. "Get up, Griff, and leave me alone. I don't want to hear any more excuses." There was such a peremptory sharpness in her voice that Griff had no choice but to obey. The quarrel had come, but he had not dreamed that his mother would have taken it as badly as this. The fire had burnt very low when he next ventured into the room. The old lady was still in the same attitude. "Mother," whispered Griff. She made no answer for awhile; then the tears ran slowly down her cheeks--those scanty tears of the old, which are so much bitterer, so much more heavily laden, at the end of a lifetime's disappointments. "It is time I went, Griff. You are tired of the old woman, you and Kate." Then there followed such a storm of lover-like protestations, such a fondling of the wrinkled face and hands, that these two might never have been mother and son at all, but just a pair of newly-married youngsters getting through the business of their first quarrel. And Griff vowed, at the end of it all, that nothing would induce him to leave the Manor, since the dearest old lady in the world wanted him to stay. Whereupon the mother got up from her chair, wiped her eyes, smoothed out the rumples in her dress, and put twice as much asperity as usual into her voice. "Now you are ridiculous, Griff. Dear, dear; here have I been wasting my time in crying--it was only a tear or two, though, was it?--when I should have been supplying you with wits. Stay on at the Manor, when you have bought Gorsthwaite? Waste your money, and let the house drop to pieces for want of looking after? Boy, where _is_ your common sense?" And that was how Griff came to take his wife to Gorsthwaite Hall. CHAPTER XVIII. THE CUTTING OF PEATS.