"When you were half a bear only, it didn't matter; but now I am getting awfully afraid lest you should eat me up." Yet her playfulness was dulled by the pitiful tremor in her voice. "You came in search of white heath? Our blood runs red up here, and so does the heather. It was a wild-goose chase at best," said Griff, deliberately, with a meaning she could not fail to catch. Still she would not give in. It had become her life, this yearning for the love she had trifled away. "Griff, you don't, you can't mean to be so brutal! When are you coming to live in town again? You are more yourself there." "Never," said Griff, bluntly. She laid one hand on his sleeve. "Griff, dear, haven't you a little--just a little--consideration for us poor wretches who happen to be--to be fond of you? It is a sin to hide yourself among these barren moors." Still he felt no twinge of pity--only the goad of past weakness. "It is a sin to _seek_ at times, Sybil. You have told me as much--often. You were so very good that you shamed me into virtue, and sent me up here out of the reach of temptation; why do you not let well alone?" The irony in his voice made her wince. She turned and moved away from him, into the whirling mist. The first suggestion of pity touched him. "Don't go like this," he said, more gently. "Let us part friends, for old times' sake." She faltered and came back. Even those few steps away from him had taught her what a final separation would mean, and she resolved to risk all on a single throw. Without parley, with a suddenness that left Griff resourceless, she was in his arms. "Griff, will you never understand? Take me, take me, for I can't live without you. Things are all changed, dear; I am free now, and--Griff, I love you so." Her voice broke, her helplessness was pitiably real. Once, Sybil Ogilvie would have said that it was only country hoydens who indulged in these crude lapses of taste. Yet there were few farm-wenches in all the Marshcotes moorside who could have brought themselves to show so little restraint, so little of the pride of shame; this dainty, well-bred child of the world had outfaced them all. Griff held her away from him, looking straight into her eyes, with a glance that was half of contempt, half of impatient pity. "You never stopped to ask, Sybil, if we were both free." In this supreme moment of his revenge, vengeance seemed a sorry thing. Men cannot but deaden themselves to the faults of a woman who is wise enough to love them; yet under all this Griff was chivalrously ashamed that any woman should so have humbled herself before him. Mrs. Ogilvie looked at him with startled eyes. "What do you mean? Not that--oh, Griff, not that _you_ are bound--married?" He nodded silently. He was marvelling that he, or any man, had been able to strike down to a bit of real feeling in this baby-temptress. "Do you care for her, Griff?" she asked suddenly. Again he nodded. Protestations seemed out of place.