Griff had given her a hint as to how matters stood, and the old lady was entirely of her son's mind, "that it would make a man of Gabriel." Griff took his mother in both arms and lifted her as if she had been a baby. "Oh, you threaten me, little mother, do you?" cried he looking fierce. "Griff, what a boy you are--put me down again. I shall never be able to train you properly," she added whimsically. "I can't learn the trick of being angry with you." "Honour thy father and thy mother," murmured Gabriel Hirst, scandalized for the hundredth time by Griff's relations with the old lady. "I wish Griff was more respectful." The end of it was, of course, that Lomax set off with his friend. Through the churchyard they gained the moor, and thence struck across to the foot of Ling Crag village. The last of the sunset was dying over the heath, and something in the aspect of that well-loved country of his touched an inner chord in the preacher. "It's sweet and clean, Griff," he said presently. "It seems to be telling me not to take shame if----" He broke off there, and Griff supplied finish and answer alike in his brief, "You can believe it, Hirst." They crossed the stile on their left, and pushed up the darkening valley. The stream brawled beside them; from a farm on the crest of the ridge came the clatter of milking-pails and the guttural cries of the farmer's men. The tail of a stiff west wind blew down the Dene, and Gabriel Hirst, for a few brief moments, threw his sins to the breeze and let it make what it would of them. But his heart misgave him when they stood at Miller Rotherson's door. The maid was long in responding to his knock, and his disquietude grew almost to a panic; he would have turned and fled, had he been alone. Then, after Nancy had admitted them and shown them into the parlour where the miller was smoking his pipe, Gabriel could find no word to say, and Lomax had to take the initiative. Old Rotherson took stock of the stranger, decided that he liked the hang of him, and declared it was downright neighbourly to pay him a call in this way. "Well," laughed Griff, "apart from anything else, I was curious to see the man who could make Dene Mill pay. When I was last at home the old place had been unlet for years, and people said that the big millers near the towns had it all their own way nowadays." "And there was no room for the smaller men, they told you? Oh, yes, they told me that tale, too, when I started here. They were wrong, Mr. Lomax. I said, the first time I saw the mill, that a man who could let all that water-power run to waste, day in and day out, deserved to starve. I trusted a little in Providence, and a good deal in my own head, and I got the place dirt cheap on a long lease. I supply half the countryside now, and am bidding fair to secure the other half. The big towns are too far from Marshcotes and Ling Crag and the scattered farmhouses that hug the moor."