The man outside, seeing the girl's full beauty, the tearfulness of her entreaty, scrabbled with his finger-nails up and down the stone of the window-sill. "Roddick, you fool," he gasped, "why don't you take love in your two hands while you have the chance! Life is so damnably short--and liable to accident--yes, accidents--the girl mayn't live. Oh, you unutterable fool, why don't you take the bit between your teeth? Cut and run; you told me to do as much once." But Roddick was answering Janet in the same tone of eager entreaty. And Griff, forgetting his own feelings again, lost himself in the progress of the drama. "Such a life, Janet, would grind you into the dust. It is easy to say you will face it--now. But wherever we went, however we hid ourselves, some one would drive it home to us. They would shatter your peace of mind, Janet, and I should go mad for pity of what I had brought you to. Come, little girl," he finished, with quiet decision. "I know you will trust me to do what is best." "Bravo, Roddick! A plucky fight you're making!" cried the man without, breathlessly. The intensity of his excitement hurt him. He wanted the scene to close now. Roddick had taken the girl in his arms with his last words; he was whispering tender incoherencies to her, as one does to a frightened child. Then he wrapped her, unresisting this time, in her cloak. The tears had dried in long stains down her white face, and she was gazing at him apprehensively. "Leo." "Yes, sweetheart?" "You are right, quite right, and I am wrong. It was wicked of me to come here and tempt you. Only, you don't know how hard the home life is. Others come and make love to me, Leo, and it seems such an insult--to both of us. Yet I can say nothing, do nothing. But I oughtn't to have tempted you. Can you forgive me?" "Forgive you? Come along, little woman, and we won't talk about forgiveness till we have struck home across the moor; and then----" "And then, dear?" she asked wistfully. It seemed so cold, this homeward journey. "Then _I_ shall plead for _your_ forgiveness. You must have thought me a brute, Janet." The man outside the window breathed again. The play, to all intents and purposes, was finished. Roddick had won, and there was only that twitching of the mouth to show how much it had cost him. Griff Lomax awoke to a sense of his own importance in the drama. He remembered that a certain disreputable waif-and-stray, with a shipwrecked heart and a partially deranged understanding, held the key of the situation. He went to the door, opened it without ceremony, and stepped into the room. Roddick turned quickly on the intruder. Janet cowered back against the window. "What do you want?" demanded Roddick. The room was low and gloomy, and he failed to recognize Griff at a first glance. "Don't you know me? I'm Lomax," laughed the new-comer. Roddick stood staring at him for awhile; then went up to him.