"You would not have asked me that if the experiment had gone wrong. Suppose you had made a mistake, Griff? Considering your impulsiveness, it is the least one could have expected of you--to make a mistake. Don't you think two months in each other's company, with no one to fill up the gaps, would have made the truth clear to you?" "If you knew Kate as I do, mother," said the son, with a ridiculous air of possession, "you would see there _could_ have been no mistake." "Very proper, dear. You sound just like a lover, and I wouldn't be in any hurry, if I were you, to become a mere husband. Your father always forgot, to the end of the chapter, that we hadn't tumbled into love with each other the day before." CHAPTER XVI. RODDICK'S WIFE. "Well?" demanded Roddick, as Griff thrust his head in at the open window of the Wynyates parlour. "How does marriage go?" "Like the weather, old man; soft, variable winds, no showers to speak of, and a touch of green showing everywhere." "Come in, can't you? Why do you stand there with that perennial grin on your face, as if you were posing for a full-length portrait of the happy bridegroom? Away with you newly-married people!" "Thanks," said Griff, striding over the low window-sill. "You think the whole world must be looking through your rose-tinted spectacles. Wait till the glass gets smoked, and walk delicately in the meanwhile; you're not a degree higher than a cat on a glass-bottled wall, and if you go prancing along in this style----" "You are in very good form this morning, Roddick. It does a man good to listen to your breadth of epithet." "Breadth of epithet! Why talk like a book, Lomax? Call them swears, and have done with it. What have you come for?" "To be congratulated. I couldn't miss your pretty way of putting things, so here I am, the very morning after my return." "I suspect you want comfort," snarled Roddick. "I can give you that. There's a heap of fools in the same box with you, so you won't run a chance of feeling lonely. About how soon do you think of bolting for good and all?" "Roddick, you're going a bit too far----" began Griff, hotly. But he caught a wicked light of satisfaction in the other's face, and made up his mind that he would not be guyed--"trailed," as they called it in Marshcotes--however much the amusement might give Roddick a vent for his ill-humour. "I mostly am. Once I went very much too far, and--have some tobacco." They smoked on in silence for awhile. Griff ventured a remark at length; his companion took no notice whatever, but went on frowning at the live peats in the grate. "About that woman," said Roddick, finally. "Which woman?" "The thing you mistook for a vampire when you were last here. What did the pretty little beast do to you, Lomax, out there in the darkness?" Griff shuddered; he had almost forgotten the incident under stress of the quick march of later events.