“That’ll do, Baldwin Briggs,” she said. “This house is mine, not yours, and if anyone goes it’ll not be me. You’d perhaps forgotten that, same as I had. You’ve had the use of it so long that you’d come to think it was yours. I said I was your lodger, but it’s _you_ who’re lodgers, and I’ll leave when it suits me. You’d best get your teas, if you can eat any. I want none. Maybe we shall all have cooled by morning.” With these words she crossed the room and went upstairs; and Baldwin and Keturah looked at each other, and finding nothing to say turned to the table and made a sorry meal. CHAPTER VIII IN WHICH NANCY QUESTIONS HER HEART AND MANIWEL QUESTIONS HIS SON ALAS! for Nancy. Heroics, she discovered, were all very well in their way, but they were only the husks of satisfaction, containing nourishment for neither body nor soul, and leaving behind them a bitter task and the beginnings of a headache. And though to retire to one’s room some five hours before the usual time might be a picturesque way of registering a protest it was one that reacted awkwardly on the protestor, obliging her to fast when hungry, and (for lack of a candle) to company with darkness; the only alternative being to swallow her pride and return for supplies. Rather than eat so nauseous a dish of humble pie Nancy preferred to treat herself as a prisoner, and she flung up the window and let the cold night air blow upon her hot cheeks as she sat there, resting her elbows on the sill. The breath of the uplands is tonic at all times; but on the wild moors of Mawm when winter grips the Pennines and forges its weapons of offence on the rocky heights, the tonic is that of iron and steel, a tonic that spurs and goads. “According to its quality and temperature air hath an effect on manners,” the old physiologists affirmed, “and that of mountains is a potent predisposer to rebellion.” We have let the theory die; but these forefathers of our scientists were no fools, and we find the proof of their hypothesis in the high places of the land, where rebels are bred and flourish. Nancy may have cooled as she sat there, watching the stars light their lamps in the black sky; but the cooling was that of iron that has been bent to a purpose and is no longer malleable. For half an hour she never changed her position, and was unconscious that her elbows were sore from the pressure of her weight upon the window-frame; but even when she saw that a splinter had pierced the flesh and drawn blood she scarcely moved, being too busy with her thoughts to concern herself with trifles.