Griff, during the next few months, was greatly exercised in mind touching his friend the preacher. Gabriel Hirst's moods were swinging to wider extremes nowadays; the constant sight of Greta kept the inner fires going, and whether they flamed or smouldered was a question largely of the way she treated him. Not altogether, though: there were times when he wrenched himself free of his fetters, and set his thoughts on the Word instead of on Greta, and made his congregations quake with his whirlwind eloquence. But he was what old Jose Binns termed "wobbly-like"; his temper was uncertain, his attitude towards his fellows harsh beyond all his old-time limits of justice. If for an hour or so he could persuade himself into the belief that Greta cared for him, then he spent the rest of the day in self-denunciation, because his heart was fixed on carnal welfare: if the girl ran across his path and chanced to mock him, as she frequently did, he forgot that she was not the highest goal man could have, and railed at the destiny which showed him a heaven with shut gates. On and off, he sickened with hate of Lomax, thinking him an unacknowledged rival; and after the stormy scenes, which generally followed hot-foot on the heels of such humours, came abasement of himself before Lomax--an abasement that hurt Griff far more than the passion which preceded it. Gabriel Hirst suffered, during these months, as he had not known how to suffer before that meeting with Greta Rotherson on the sunny Sabbath morning. He grew more sensitive than ever to changes in the face of the moor and sky. When the day was bright and the wind blew soft, there seemed excuse for his gaining passion--even a hope sometimes; but when the storm-skies opened, and the wind came ravening out of the north, and the moor streams swelled themselves to rivers, Gabriel Hirst would awake to the sins of the world and his own wrongdoing--would hark back to his scanty fare, and his wrestlings with the Adversary. But the Adversary, with that practical, vivid imaginativeness of his, showed nowadays in the guise of a woman. Greta, for her part, was growing out of all patience with the preacher. He could not speak to her but the words tripped each other up as they came from his mouth; he was awkward with his hands and feet directly he found himself near her; he looked a hundred proposals out of his eyes, but never approached the utterance of one. She cared for him--if he would only let her--and she was angry with him, ashamed of, sorry for, him; so that amongst it all the girl, like Gabriel himself, was like to spoil her temper for good. What angered her most was that Gabriel was always like this in _her_ company; she had seen him riding with Griff, and had noticed how manly, and neat, and broad-shouldered he looked. Why would he never come to her in decent clothes, or square his shoulders when he stood before her? And why, in the name of goodness, did she care _how_ he came to her?