Both his victims stood irresolute from surprise. Sybil had forgotten hysterics altogether in the smart of the blow and her anger at such unwarrantable treatment. Joe found it hard to meet his enemy's matter-of-fact item of information. Finally, the quarryman, swearing and grumbling, took himself off along the track indicated, and Griff returned to Mrs. Ogilvie. "I'm very sorry," he said, laughing at the absurdity of this last scene in the drama; "I'm very sorry if I hurt you, Sybil, but I was not going to have you on my hands in the middle of the moor. See, we shall have the sun out again in a minute or two. I believe we went to sleep, you and I, and dreamed we were in a fog, and you, or I, or both of us, said a quantity of foolish things, which we can't remember now. Shall I put you on your way to the Folly?" She went with him passively. Nothing mattered very much now; it was kind of him, she felt vaguely, to smooth over his denial, but what did words signify? Her passion crept under shelter, whimpering. The mist dispersed as quickly as it had gathered. The piled banks melted to fleecy, lace-like bits of scudding vapour. The moor was a twinkling sea of mist-beads, that shamed to fainter crimson the heather-tips from which they hung. Gorsthwaite Hall showed clear at the top of the rising ground ahead. "Who was that brute? He seemed to have some quarrel with you," said Mrs. Ogilvie, at last. "I robbed him of the best woman God ever made. Let him be," Griff answered, with a warm impulse to acknowledge the place which Kate held in his regard. Sybil flashed round on him, her eyes ablaze. "Then I have loved a fool--just a fool?" She shrugged her pretty shoulders, and laughed mirthlessly. "I have made a mess of my self-respect," she went on, with bitter frankness; "I should have minded less if the woman who claims you had been other than the cast-off wife of a clown. Griff, you will make me hate you yet; love cannot survive the jar of absurdity." Griff answered nothing, for Kate herself was standing at the Hall gate. He had thought of skirting the house at the rear, instead of risking this meeting by following the proper track; but he disliked the suggestion of cowardice in such a plan. As he glanced from the delicate bundle of drapery and affectation at his side to the steady, splendid grace of the wife he loved, he was glad of the meeting. "Kate, here is an old friend of my London days, whom I have just rescued from the mist. Mrs. Ogilvie, this is my wife." For a fleeting moment Griff understood that revenge may be exceeding sweet; then he crushed the feeling. Kate inclined her head, and smiled with the ease of a woman who trusts her husband. Sybil Ogilvie, too, tried to smile; but she did not mind one whit the less now that she found her rival worthier than she had thought her. "You will come in and rest after your walk?" suggested Kate, in her even, rounded voice.