“But I’m not flitting, mother, not for a week or two yet.” He was touched by the loneliness, the independence and the pride of her appeal. “I’m needed here, ye see--you alone in the house and farm work to be seen to--and, besides, they’d be scared to death at Marshlands if I gave them no time to get used to the notion of my coming back. They’d all be down with fever the next day, or think they were.” “You’re a good lad, Reuben,” she said, after a pause. “Give me your bundle, and let me set your things to the fire. ’Twill be rheumatiz ye’ll catch if ye put them on as they are.” In the afternoon the sun got out for an hour, for the rain was tired of its own vehemence. Gaunt put the clothes, warm and with the peat-smell of the fire on them, under his arm, and went up into the moor, past Peggy’s grave, past the little, grey bridge where the harebells were reviving from the drought. Just above the bridge was a loop known to him of old; it had dwindled during the hot months, and the rains had scarcely helped it yet. The land, for all the steady downpour, had not slaked its thirst; and had let only the shallowest of streamlets run off its surface to feed the larger brooks. For all that, the pool was deep enough for a bath, and Gaunt stripped, and plunged into the water. The glare and misery of the past weeks seemed to yield to this gentle lapping of the peat-brown water. He had done his work rightly, for once in his heedless life, and knew it; and the way of Peggy’s death, the squalor and the terror of it, were washed clean by the stream that sucked, and laughed, and gurgled round the edges of the pool. A curlew came and looked at him, as he splashed in the brown water. A burn-trout finned its way upstream in fright when it found a four-limbed monster in its favourite pool. For the rest, he had no company and needed none. CHAPTER XXII Reuben was home again at Marshlands. His housekeeper still watched him carefully when she brought in his meals, and Peter, the farm-lad, stood at least ten feet away when the master came out into the yard to give his orders. Only Michael, the head man about the farm, showed common sense. “Fever’s like a turnip lanthorn,” said Michael, a few days after the master’s return. “Ye’ve only to light the bogie, an’ set it up i’ a dark corner, an’ watch ’em running for dear life. Oh, by th’ Heart, sir, I’d liefer face it any day as ye did, than go running into my burrow like a rabbit every time a kitty-call sounded over the pastures.”