"By Gad, what a night!" muttered Laverack, as he went quietly out of the house and crossed to the bend of the drive where his horse was waiting for him. "Why Heaven gives a man daughters, Heaven only knows. I shall be wet to the skin before I get back. Cranshaw first, if that knave Rigby told me right, and after that I must ask the way." CHAPTER XXIX. WHAT THE SNOWFLAKES FELL UPON. At four of the same afternoon, while the sun was setting redly into the snow-banks, Griff Lomax sat in the parlour of Gorsthwaite, with his child's dead body on his knees. The grate was fireless, and the failing twilight left all but the table and a chair near the window in darkness. The two maid-servants, and Simeon, the farm-man, moved uneasily about the kitchen, and asked one another in muffled tones how it was likely to fare with the master. Early that morning the child had followed its mother, and Griff, alone here in the parlour, was dumbly kicking against the pricks. One after another, all that he had in the world had gone into that shadowy Beyond of which he had neither fear nor hope. On his knees lay the refutation of all the dreams he had cherished, the plans he had framed, for the future of another Lomax who should carry down the name, who should add one more to the list of moor-men that had thriven under the old Manor roof. From time to time he stroked the little cold body with his own cold hands, and laughed softly to himself: it seemed a hideous jest that this scrap of tissue, which would soon be worse than the earth that covered it, should have caused such fantasies. It was to have grown to a lusty manhood, and fought and loved and hated--and now--and now-- Such utter vacuum, of mind and purpose, could not go on. No man, with strength at his command, can see life for long as an empty mirror of his own emptiness. Something must be done, was the thought that flashed into Griff's mind. He got up from his chair and laid the body on it; then walked slowly up and down the darkened room, striking against the furniture, and feeling vaguely glad of the smarts. A cry broke from him. Round and round his brain, in a dizzy, never-ending circle, ran those words of the doctor's-- _It is all owing to that brute Strangeways; he led her a dog's life for years._ The frightened servants, listening by the kitchen fire, heard the door of the parlour open with a clash. The master went heavily down the passage and out at the front door. There was work for him yet in the world. "Poor lad!" murmured the cook, who was older than her master, and eager to mother him with her phrases. "Poor lad, it fair goes to a body's heart to see th' way he's taking on." "He war bad enow when th' missus died; but it's nowt to what's ta'en him since," said the housemaid, with a tug at her apron-corner.