He stowed away the books in sundry capacious pockets, and set off towards the moor at a swinging pace. It was near the end of March, but the frost, repenting the easy winter it had given the Marshcotes folk, had suddenly bestirred itself and gripped the moorside shrewdly. Just as Griff left the churchyard, he met Greta Rotherson on her way to the village. "You're enjoying the frost, too?" he said, coming to rest against a gate. "No, I'm not," retorted Greta, crossly; "it's far too cold, and the end of one's nose gets red." "Not _your_ nose, at any rate; your cheeks have used up the supply.--I saw Gabriel this morning for five minutes." "Did you?" Disdainfully. "Yes; he called at the mill last night, and came round to tell me how disappointed he was to find you out." "To find father out? He would be: we were with friends in the village." "Look here, Miss Rotherson--why do you treat poor old Hirst as you do?" queried Griff, bluntly. "I don't know what you mean, Mr. Lomax. Why should I treat him differently?" "Because--well, being a woman, you know more than I can tell you. It seems a pity, that's all; he worries about things." Greta dropped her air of aloofness. "Gabriel Hirst," she snapped, "will never get rid of his preaching. If he was making love to a woman, he'd quote Scripture in the middle of it--and a woman doesn't want that." "Well, no, she doesn't. But women were made to put up with things. Can't you get at the man in Gabriel, and let the preacher go hang?" "I can do the last thing certainly. Good day, Mr. Lomax: you seem very anxious to get your friend settled in life." The sun was dying bloodily behind Peewit House as Griff climbed the last stretch of rising ground. The clouds showed stormy. A dun mist hugged the skirts of the moor. "This is cheery after the cold look of things outside," he cried, as he stretched his legs before the fire. "It was kind of you to bother about the books: you will have a stormy walk back, I'm afraid." The trouble of contact with him weighed heavily on Kate for the first moment; she could scarcely find words in which to answer him. "Ah, but that doesn't matter when you can see in the dark, as we moor folk can." He was curiously insistent on that moor bond between them. "Will you let me smoke just one pipe, and then I must be off; mother is down with a cold, and I promised not to be away for long." He lit his pipe, and Kate Strangeways went out in a little while, to return with tea and buttered toast; they fell into some out-of-the-way topics over the tea, and continued them until another pipe, and yet another, had been smoked. Griff had forgotten all about the time, and his companion, while she remembered it, remembered also that Sunday was a day which her husband invariably spent at the Marshcotes inn, and that he would not be back much before midnight at the earliest; she had felt lonely before Griff came, and she wanted him to stay as long as forgetfulness of the hour would let him.