"We can't entertain you all here," he laughed, "but come in, as many as can squeeze a way." "An' them as can't, will find quarters at th' Dog an' Grouse!" cried Jack o' Ling Crag. "An' th' Bull can mak room for a two or three," chimed in the rival landlord. After the noisy crowd had been got rid of, they had supper, the three of them; and after that Griff lit his pipe, and stretched out his long legs to the blaze, and looked from the mother on one side of the hearth to the wife on the other--wondering the while that this vexed problem of marriage worked itself out so exceeding smoothly in practice. It seemed odd to Kate to find herself once again in that firelit parlour, where she had waited till Griff might return to claim her, where she had sickened with dread lest an ever-watchful Providence should snatch the coming happiness from her grasp. She had forgotten, in the midst of her dread, that it is only the things we fear most abjectly which never happen; keen terror would seem to act as a buffer between its object and its fulfilment, but she had not stopped to think of that. And now she was here, with Griff beside her--with an earnest, too, from those she had known, her life through, that they were minded to esteem her a woman of honour. Impulsively she put her arms round Griff's neck and drew his face down. "I had never dreamed such things could be," she whispered. The honeymoon had left her with her illusions sweet and sound. She was no girl, to be outraged by necessities, to quiver under the little jars that make up the wear and tear of a privacy shared with another. Her idols were a woman's; her hopes of the new life were of tougher fabric than the girl's peach-bloom romanticism, to be rubbed bare by any passing sleeve; and those two months they had had together, she and Griff, had given her no cause to doubt the future. Whether the Providence she held in superstitious dread had chosen prose instead of poetry, had elected to rob her, hour by weary hour after she had once settled into her new life, of the happiness that now almost hurt her by its intensity--whether Providence thought surfeit a subtler cruelty than the mere dashing away of an untasted cup, remained to be seen--but Kate's dreads did not lie that way, and her home-coming had not a drop of bitter in among the sweets. The mother's keen eyes took stock of them both, and the doubt in her face resolved itself slowly as she watched. Like all homely women, she had a quick scent for harmony or discord between married people, and she felt that Kate and Griff were "all right." "Well, mother?" said Griff, when Kate had left them. "That is a big question to ask, dear, is it not? But you will do, I fancy, the pair of you. I have been anxious, terribly anxious, about the effect these eight weeks would have on you. You went away gaily enough, boy, but _I_ knew that it was kill or cure." "What do you mean, quite?"