"Forgotten supper, had you?" snapped his host, when he was fairly launched. "A healthy man never does that. What's amiss, Lomax?" Griff looked at him thoughtfully across the table. "Something serious. I don't come for advice unless I need it." "And then you don't take it. You always were a cross-grained beggar. Well?" "There's a woman in the case." "Damn the women!" growled Roddick. "Have some more beef." Griff said no more on the subject till they had turned their chairs to the fire; then he made a plain statement of fact. "So it's come at last, has it?" said Roddick, gruffly. Griff flushed. "Hold hard, Roddick; you're going a bit too far," he muttered, in answer to the spirit rather than the matter of the other's words. "We are innocent, I tell you!" "Matter of terms, my boy. You kissed her, you say? It amounts to much the same thing." "It does nothing of the kind. Besides, what fault there was lies at my door; she is not to blame." "I never insinuated that either of you were to blame. I only said that it amounted to the same thing." A silence followed, broken at length by Griff. "It's pretty hopeless, either way," he finished. "If I leave things as they are, she runs a constant danger of being murdered by that brute. If we cut the whole thing, and go away together, it will break mother's heart." Roddick had been oddly moved during this recital. Twice he had been on the point of blurting out something that lay at the top of his mind; thrice his face had grown soft with pity. It would not have been Roddick if he had allowed these lapses to go without correction. "Well, you've got to choose," he said bluntly. "We always have to choose when anything serious is at stake. Which is more to you, the lover or the mother?" Griff frowned at him. "Roddick," he said, with just the trace of a catch in his voice, "when I speak of my mother, I don't mean any conventional rot. All my life she has been a lover and a friend to me." The older man softened, and jeered again to hide it. "You sound like a tract, Lomax. Give the woman up, then, and stick to the feeding-bottle." "You're a brute!" muttered Griff, savagely, and said no more. For ten minutes they sat and stared into the fire. The trees without--starveling sentries that challenged the moor winds, but were fain to let them pass--whimpered sorrowfully. A spit or two of rain sounded against the windows. "God! I ought to have been born up here; I feel like that," cried Roddick, at last, pointing to the window on his right. Griff had his back to the window and his eyes on the fire. Had he glanced at Roddick, he would have seen the sweat standing out on his forehead; the whole look of the man was changed since that casual glance at the window. But Griff noted nothing; he sat there moodily until his host should find something useful to say. Roddick recovered himself with an effort.