The months had been slow to teach him, but he learned their lesson now. As the seasons had run their course, the man's great love had been growing--growing so silently, so little at a time, that he had not once pulled himself up to say, "This is love that has you by the throat; thrust it off while you can." And now--now, all in the space of that quick uplifting of his eyes to hers, he had come to understand. Nothing he had felt, read of, dreamed about, was like this masterful reality; it hurried him along blindfold, as the welter and swing of a gale from the north had now and then driven him clean off the moor-track--into the bogland, it might be. He leaped from his chair, and crossed over to her, and put his arms about her. She spoke no word, and he was silent; but her lips went out to his. The reaction followed. He set her free, and strode restlessly up and down the room, with its black oak panels, its ridiculous china dogs on the mantelshelf, its fiery eye of smouldering ash. She followed his steps with her eyes, and cared not one whit save that he loved her. "See, Kate," he said, coming close to her again, "you are the wife I should have had, but you are not free to hear me tell you so. We must go apart, you and I, lest--my darling, my darling, how I want you!" Conscience, stilled for awhile, raised its voice. The woman warded off that second caress with which the man was minded to point his logic. "Let me alone, Griff! Let me go. You know it is not right." He stood irresolute. The worst and the best in him fell to blows, and fought the quarrel out to the bitter end. Then he put his lips to her hand, and raised her very gently. "Show me to my room, Kate. It is time you were asleep; you look tired," he said, as nearly in the tones of the friend of yesterday as he could contrive. She lit two candles, gave him one, and preceded him up the creaking wooden stairs. She let her hand rest in his for a space at the door of his room, then left him. At eleven of the same morning, the godly folk of Marshcotes, clothed in their Sunday best, were singing lustily within the bleak walls of the Primitive Methodist Chapel; other godly villagers were singing with slightly less vigour in the Parish Church across the way. Joe Strangeways' mind, however, was set on other things, as he shambled across the ill-paved square that fronts the churchyard. He glanced at the church clock, and leered at large upon the village. "Eleven of a Sunday morn, an' me noan drunk yet," he observed. "Dang me, but that beäts all." By way of repairing this slight omission, Strangeways entered the Bull. The fog was thick in his brain, and thick on the landscape, when he emerged. A friend in need guided him to the verge of the moor, but it was clear that there was to be no getting home that night; so the friend guided him back to the Bull, and it was seven of the next morning when he set off for Peewit, to change into his working clothes before going to the quarries.