Greta wondered that he could stoop to light banter at such a time. But she looked at him more closely, and she read in his face what the effort meant to him. Yet Griff was smiling a moment later with genuine merriment; he was thinking that it was a more awkward scene for Gabriel than if he had really been dead, instead of very much alive. "Does your wife know?" asked Gabriel, suddenly. "Of course not. No one knows but we three. I told Kate I had slipped over the quarry accidentally--so I had, in a way. I said you might be coming in to-night to talk over your worries, because I guessed you would rush off here to blurt out what had happened. I know you to a hair's-breadth, Gabriel, you see. Make your mind easy on that score, old chap." "I shall tell her," said the preacher, quietly. "Tell her? You'll do nothing of the kind! Nay, Gabriel, there is a limit. Once let you do this, and the next thing you will be standing on the churchyard steps to admit all Marshcotes to the secret." "Your wife must know," persisted Gabriel. Greta stole a look at him; and dearly she loved that rugged light of determination in his face--the face that had once seemed plain to her. So absorbed were they in their own affairs that they had not noted the figure standing in the doorway. It was Kate, her hair tumbled about her nightgown, her bare feet heedless of the cold oak on which they were resting. "Gabriel Hirst," she said, "was it you who sent him over the quarry-edge?" The preacher tried to look her in the face, and failed; tried to speak, but his throat was dry. Kate repeated her question, in the same deep, relentless tone. "It was," whispered Gabriel, hoarsely. "Then God forgive you, for it's little forgiveness you'll ever get from me." Griff, for the first time since he had known her, was furious with his wife. "Kate, for shame--for shame!" he thundered. But across the room she sent him such a look of tenderness--of idolatry, almost--that his anger died within him, and the shame returned on himself. The preacher stood with head downcast; he had not come here to plead against a fair judgment, he had come to bear his punishment. A hush settled over the two men, and over the women who loved them. Then it was borne in on Greta that the man of her choice was being cruelly ill-used. An anger, fierce as Kate's own, gave her words with which to meet the crisis. "Have you never loved your husband, Kate Lomax?" she cried. "Have you never felt what it would mean if some other woman came between you--some woman who pretended to be your friend, and played you false behind your back? Would you want to kill her, or is this talk of your moor-bred women so much idle chatter?" Kate looked at her husband again. That graphic touch of rivalry brought a grim smile to her lips. "I think I should kill her," she said quietly.