The Marshcotes Moor was bounded, on the side remote from the village, by a broad stretch of "intake"--sparsely covered grass land, wrested from the heath by long years of sweat and perseverance. Beyond this again was an undulating valley, scarcely more than a dip in the moor plateau, which was full of rushes and swampy tracts, with here and there a bog. Above this valley lay Gorsthwaite Moor, where ling and bilberry-plants had less of their own way than on the Marshcotes side; great patches of gorse dotted the moor, and the sun never rose, summer or winter, without finding at least a few outstanding spots of yellow on which to shine. At one corner of this moor, some two miles away from Marshcotes village, stood Gorsthwaite Hall, a fine specimen of the grim architecture in which the old moor squires delighted. The rectangular windows peered out at you, watchful and cold, from under their rugged brows of blackened sandstone. The door, plainly fashioned and massive, seemed to grudge the wonted breadth of entry, though its narrowness was more in appearance than in fact. The round-topped walls that guarded its paved courtyard harboured few of the kindly green sorts of mosses, but they were friends with bleak, grey lichens. The very chimney-stacks looked stiff and unbending, as if they had little to do with the roof that supported them; and the water-butt under the eaves, with its round black belly, was suggestive, in some vague, elusive way, of tragedies half-forgotten. Yet Griff and his wife were as merry as the old house was sad. The spring had come and gone, and summer had run well on into August, and still they would hug themselves, these two, in the thought of their isolation. There were a couple of attics at the top of the house, well-lighted from the roof, which Griff had knocked into one room and fitted up as a studio. The itch for painting had taken hold of him with more than its old-time vigour, and the one perpetual ground of disagreement between Kate and himself was the fact that he would insist on making some fresh sketch of his wife's face every other day or so. "What do you find to talk about all your time?" Roddick had snarled one day. "We live; we don't talk much about it," Griff had assured him, with a laugh that was entirely one of satisfaction. That was just it. He had known wittier women than Kate, and some that were more beautiful in their own way; but Kate--well, she rounded off his life for him, and there was an end of it.