"I _have_ something to tell you now. First of all, my best thanks for as merry a picnic as I am likely to have for many a long day to come. You're not a bad lot, take you all in all, but you can't make up your minds quick enough, and you get hit while you're thinking. Next, Joe Strangeways--he's not here, by the way--Joe Strangeways was quite right about my being in the Bull with the stranger, and I've no doubt he listened at the keyhole. The stranger had got a notion into his head that I knew a good deal about these pleasant Sunday afternoons on the moor, and he came to Marshcotes expressly to pump me. Well, I told him a lot--but it was all wrong, every word of it. I put him as far off the track as I could, and I set him homewards with a glass of good Scotch whisky inside him. Now, do you believe me, or don't you?" CHAPTER XXVII. THE RIFT GAPES WIDE. January was here, and the frost had long ago set a sharp finger and thumb on the world. The grouse were visibly tamer than they had been a week ago; the peewits came nearer to farmsteads at the lowest point of their wheeling flight; the smaller feathered fry looked more than ever like desolate waifs and strays, as they fluttered from patch to frozen patch, above the whitened heather. So keen was the air that at Gorsthwaite could be heard the busy clatter of the quarry which hugged the Ling Crag end of Marshcotes Moor. At eleven of a Wednesday morning, Griff was being soundly rated by his wife's nurse, a slim little energetic body who had seen to the bringing of too many infants into the world to feel much reverence for useless males. "Mr. Lomax, I wish you'd go somewhere out-of-doors and stay there, that I do. Here you be, upstairs and down; now listening at the door, and popping out at me like a firebrand whenever I leave her room, to ask if there's any change for the worse; now tramping about the floor downstairs, till a body would think you'd fair set your mind on making the most noise you could." "I--I didn't know you could hear me," said Griff, meekly. "I took my boots off, but the boards are all old and crazy. I must sit down, I suppose." "Sit down? Nay, that you never will! As well ask you to sit on a hornet's nest as a chair, in your present feckless state. The only chance for us is to bundle you out-of-doors. I'd do it myself if I was a bit bigger. Dear, dear! it's a puzzle to me to know how the first man could grow a rib decent enough to make a woman out of. Such poor, shiftless mortals as you are--cannot sit still a minute--unless there happens to be real work for you to do----" "I'll put on my hat, I think," murmured Griff, swept towards the door by the speed of the little woman's utterances.