On a sudden the child began to cry most piteously, disturbing his father's gaining resolution. Griff's thoughts wandered out again to that ice-bound moorland graveyard, where Kate was lying in the cold. It was surely a monstrous unfairness that she had died to give the boy his taste of life--that she must evermore lie naked and friendless, while he would some day eat and drink in the lusty fulness of his manhood. But where did such thoughts carry him? Into the tangled places of shade, where neither hope nor light could show themselves. He fought them back, time after time, and slowly won his way to calm. By sheer strength of will he set his baby on the heights where its mother had had her dwelling, and fell down and worshipped the rising dawn now that the older day had set. And all the while, the child within sent up its piteous cries. And all the while, the plovers, wheeling round the chimney-stacks, ceased not to wail, and screech, and whimper. And night settled dumbly over the silent heather places. CHAPTER XXVIII. JANET. They talk yet of that winter in Marshcotes parish. Some recall it for its twelve weeks of frost, others for the depth of snow that covered all but the tallest tombstones in the cemetery for a week and a day; but one and all remember the bitter night that heralded the storm, because of a deed which the snow did its best to hide. At four of the afternoon the sun went down behind the surly spur of moor that guarded the western side of Frender's Folly. A black frost had made iron of the marshy ground, and glass of the sullen lake. All was bitter and dark, and the Folly walls seemed one with the gloom about them. The sky was a dead, expressionless grey. Then, on a sudden, yellowish banks of cloud crept up from the moor-edge, as though puffed by a noiseless wind. The grouse ceased their complaining, the curlews dropped earthward. One by one the snowflakes floated out of the cheerless sky, like tears from a frozen heart; one by one they clung to the heather sprays, blackening their murky green by contrast, or nestled in he clefts of their stalks. And every flake might have been a ghost, so subtle and lonely and sad was its wandering fall. White of snow, black of night--there was nothing over all the moor but these.