"Come, Sybil, don't talk about graves in the middle of a September day. The Folly is well enough; eat a good lunch, and you'll find it twice as desirable a place. Good-bye; I must turn back here." She clutched at him with her little gloved hands. "You shan't go in this way, you shan't! _Eat a good lunch_--is that your farewell, Griff, after--after all that has been?" "_And_ drink a half-bottle of Burgundy; I forgot that." Not at any cost was he going to have a repetition of the scene on Marshcotes Moor. And that unwarrantable pity was beginning to touch him again. She looked from the castle keep to the sweeping purple of the moor. Twice she was on the point of speaking, and twice she stopped herself. Then she crept close to him, and held up her face, and pursed out her baby-mouth. "Sweetheart, have you no pity?" she murmured. He took her two hands and touched them lightly with his lips. "It would do us no good, child. Go back to the old life; you'll forget me soon enough, if you only make up your mind to it. There, don't cry! I'm a brute, and there is an end of it. Good-bye." He turned sharp on his heel and left her. Sorry he was, but nothing more; he knew that she would forget, and the present trouble seemed to him scarcely more than a child's first taste of toothache. He forgot that the agony of a fall into a two-foot pond is very real if the victim imagines it to be as deep as the sea. Once he looked back. Amid the glowing waste stood a little hothouse figure of a woman, with yellow hair and a dimpled white-and-pink face. He thought it a quaint picture, and waved his hand twice, and swung off across the heather to the wife who would be impatiently awaiting his home-coming. CHAPTER XXIII. A "REVIVAL." Things had gone hard with the preacher since Greta and he went hand-in-hand, like a couple of guilty children, across the moor to Gorsthwaite. It was out of the question that Greta should return that night, whatever the result of her absence might be when it came to her father's ears. Gabriel, too, was induced to spend the night at Gorsthwaite; so tired out was he with trouble and the quick succession of trying scenes. But the preacher was tough in the fibre, and the night's rest well-nigh cured his body, while it gave his mind fresh vigour to understand his own Titanic worthlessness. Had he been able to fly from Greta--lest he should contaminate her--it is probable that his first instinct on awakening would have been towards showing a clean pair of heels, under the delusion that he was doing the lassie a service; but luckily his duty ran with his pleasure for once, for it was clear, even to his perceptions, that the miller would hear of Greta's leaving home the night before, and that a sufficient explanation must be forthcoming.