Yes, Griff did want his talk with the moor to be a private one. As he crossed the churchyard, and followed the path through a couple of pasture fields, and up the narrow lane that led to the first of the heather, he was full of anxious eagerness. Would the old holy places be holy still? Would that changeless, everlasting sweep of brown and grey speak to his heart as it once had done? He had been blind; he had roved among lighter allegiances--how if the moor were sick of his inconstancy, and would stretch out no hand of fellowship? But all that passed. The heath admits few to its friendship, but it never falters in its choice. As Griff swung over the rise, past the rubble heaps thrown out by the quarries; as he saw the well-remembered undulations of heather and marsh-land and peat, he knew that he was taken home again. The old swift thrill ran through him: strength restrained, pathos that scorned to voice itself, roughness that hid a mighty, yearning tenderness--he understood it all, felt it all, as he had done in the days of his freedom. No words can touch this feeling a moor man has for his country; it is a religion he never seeks to express--a vitality that helps him to do his work in the world. Up against the furthest sky-line, showing gallows-black athwart the sunset, stood the threefold timbers of a rotting crane, dismantled long ago when the quarry ceased working. Perhaps no other details of the landscape seem more to express the whole than these gaunt creatures of wood: wherever a Marshcotes man sets eye on a quarry-crane climbing into the sky, he thinks of the Marshcotes moor and the soughing of wind through the heather. A fat old grouse got up as Lomax approached, and winged its way towards the sunset. Griff, wondering if he had forgotten his ancient cunning, dropped into a clump of crowberry bushes and imitated the call of the hen. Soon a second cock grouse came whirring across the moor--but towards him this time, not away from him--and responded in a hoarse bass. Griff tried his voice at all the signals--warning and invitation, desperate love and the preliminaries of a mere flirtation; and the cock bird was taken in by them all. Griff laughed, in a round, wholesome way, as he rose to his feet again. It was only the London life that had passed away. He stood for a long while gazing into the wonderful sunset flames: from south to north the sweep of colour stretched itself, and a little north of west the half of a ruddy sun was taking its farewell of the heath. He watched till the red sun-rim had altogether gone, till the orange had faded to yellow, and the yellow to grey; till the dips in the moor plateau were filled with a mystical gloom which seemed to well upward from the peat, rather than downward from the sky; till the rotting crane, that stood on the verge of the under-world, grew ghostlike and dim as the twilight deepened to the hue of its own black timbers.