"I have to," said Roddick, with bitter weariness; "sometimes it takes a strong pairs of arms to hold her. But her tantrums are the part of our married life I find the easiest to bear. She is not always mad, you know. She only tries to throttle me in and between whiles, by way of variety; at other times she loves me dearly, she fawns on me, she---- Never mind, Lomax; it makes me sick to talk of it." "Poor old chap--poor old chap!" muttered Griff, vaguely. "Why the devil can't she die? A year or two of such a life would finish off any ordinary woman." "Don't repeat that!" cried Roddick, sharply. "The next step is, what a fool I am not to kill her, and I kick ideas of that kind out of my mind before they get a chance." "Roddick," said Griff--with a sudden glimpse of the reason that had brought his friend to this out-of-the-way moor--"Roddick, have you told me all?" The other was silent for a space. His brows came together, overhanging his deep-sunken eyes like a jagged thatch. "No, it is not all. When I said I had shelved tenderness, I lied. Dereham learned that end of my story, because he happened to know the girl's people." Griff bethought him of Frender's Folly--of the coincidence between the coming of Laverack and the letting of Wynyates Hall--of the hint that Gabriel Hirst had once given him as to the distress of Laverack's daughter. "The Laveracks, you mean?" he said bluntly. "How did you guess that?" "I remembered that you and they turned up almost together, that was all." "Well, it doesn't signify, I suppose. You're not the man to gabble, are you, Lomax? I used to wonder at what you artistic people call illicit passions; close upon forty, with a wife who had taught me my lesson, it never occurred to me that I should be bothered by love. But Dereham took me one afternoon to the Laveracks'; why I went with him, the Lord only knows, hating tea-cup frippery as I did. Anyhow, I went, and Janet was there; you can piece the beginning together for yourself. The thing was as inevitable, Lomax, as thunder after lightning; we had been waiting all our lives for each other, and--there I go, slipping into the old, weather-beaten tags. A man can't touch love with words, any more than he can describe a sunrise." "Did you strive against it?" The question was out and away before Griff could capture it. He was curious to know how a man of Roddick's stamp would behave under such an unexpected stress. "Strive? No, you fool! It's the half-way people who flutter and beat their wings against the cage. A man either cuts the whole thing at once, or yields unconditionally. I yielded. Then Laverack got wind of it, and took the Folly in a hurry, and carried off Janet to the moors here." Roddick got up from his chair, and began to pace about the room.