But deep under all this there was a still, small voice that would insist on a hearing now and then; it was a voice more powerful than conscience--the voice of an instinct--and it cursed him for a fool when he babbled of the wider life. For five hundred years the Lomaxes, generation after generation, had grown to manhood with the taste of the peat in their mouths, and the quickening heath-winds in their vein; his London folly was the folly of those who build their houses on the lava of a sleeping volcano, and think themselves secure. It was this underlying sense of honesty that roused Lomax, from time to time, to endeavours which were worthy of him; that made him expose rough edges, sudden elemental passions, to the startled gaze of the friends who thought they knew him. There was a little hothouse woman, named Sybil Ogilvie, who had chained him with silk, and who enjoyed what was to her merely a prudent flirtation with the tremulous zest of one who is teaching a half-tamed bear to dance. To Lomax the affair was not a flirtation--and, if it were not love, it hurt him just as much as if it had been. Mrs. Ogilvie had a talent for drawing out all that was paltry in a man, and a genius for making him believe that she had touched his strongest passions. But the end had come at last. Griff Lomax began to be restless under his yoke, contemptuous of the butterfly canvases that won him flattery. The still, small voice of the moor grew louder; he yearned for the wide-eyed hill-spaces, where the heather was free to stretch away and away till it gained the far sky-line; the streets, the houses, the hurry and empty bustle of chattering crowds, grew nauseous. He had dwelt among the flesh-pots and loved them for a space, and had learned, once for all, the sorry wisdom they had at command. He saw at last--what his friends had seen from the first--that his passion for Sybil Ogilvie was a pitiful chase after moonbeams. Without a word of good-bye to her, he packed up his things and set off for the North, and every swing of the coach set his heart beating faster, because it carried him nearer _home_. People had wondered at those two moor pictures of his, which had shown him capable of depth. They could not understand that indefinable something about them which set people's veins tingling as if they had been out in a gale from the fresh north-west. The painter knew, though, what that "something" was; he had come to the heath that had mothered him for more of it. And here he was, home again at the old Manor House, aglow with the deep under-love of his own moor folk and his old moor life. He rushed into the Manor hall like a whirlwind, and took that gaunt five-foot-ten of motherhood into his arms, and made just as much of her as his heart prompted. "Yes, Griff, you will do; you will do very well. I am proud of you," said Mrs. Lomax, standing away from him, and revelling in the sight of a son who found it necessary to stoop to the level of her lips.