Dereham hesitated a moment, then shook the proffered hand with as near an approach to warmth as he ever exhibited. "Lomax--Griff Lomax--by all that's wonderful! I didn't recognize you at first--how could I, when I suddenly came upon you masquerading as a son of toil? I always thought you were as mad as a hatter, Lomax, and now I know it." "Lomax? Was Joshua Lomax your father?" interrupted Laverack. His self-assertiveness had crawled away out of sight. Griff neither looked at him nor answered. The man was too much his senior, he felt, to admit of his knocking him down, and the temptation bore rather heavily on him just now. Dereham stared at them both, and wondered. Laverack shuffled his feet noiselessly among the peat-rubble; twice he made as if to speak, then thought better of it; finally, he turned on his heel, whistled to his dog, and set off across the moor. He turned after awhile. "Are you coming, Dereham?" he asked. "Directly. If we miss each other we shall meet at the lodge for lunch?" Again Laverack hesitated, glancing from Dereham to Lomax, and making a rapid mental calculation as to the chances of Griff's silence. "All right, one o'clock, sharp," he said, and went forward. "What the deuce are you playing at, you and Laverack?" asked Dereham. "Nothing; we don't like each other, that's all. If he asks you, when you rejoin him, how much I have told you--he is sure to do that--say to him from me that the Lomaxes carry their own burdens and never gossip about other people's." Dereham laughed easily. "By Jove, it sounds intense; but you always had a twist for intensity, Lomax, so I'm prepared for it.--Do you know, by the way, that Sybil Ogilvie is staying at Laverack's place?" he added, with a swift glance of inquiry. Griff caught the glance full, but seemed untroubled. Then he looked down at his corduroys, and tightened his leather belt with a pleased chuckle. "I hope we may meet; she would like me in this sort of rig. There's a good deal of stable-manure on my boots, too, which would round off the idyll. Bah! Dereham, you wasted me a lot of my time, you little people in London." Dereham lit a cigar before responding, and perched himself on a heathery knoll. "I always did like you, Lomax," he drawled at last. "You're such an engaging original, and this last piece of foolery suits you better than any you've tried yet. Still that air of the Almighty about you, only a little more so. Where's the poor devil of a woman?" Griff's face took an ugly shade. "Whom do you mean?" "Why, the cattle-dealer's wife--quarryman's--what was it? It would have done your vanity good--or your love, was it? only a matter of terms--to see the way Mrs. Ogilvie sickened when the affair became common gossip in our set." "Dereham!" Dereham removed his eyes from their lazy contemplation of the heat-waves dancing across the heather. Something in the other's voice startled him--some odd mixture of trouble and resentment.