"Shall I not? Those that they hang at the gibbets, I’ve heard—down in the peaceful lands where gibbets are—had as lief be hung for a herd of oxen as for one poor sheep. Grandfather can do no more than kill me—well, I’ll give him greater cause." He stood irresolute while the girl moved up the path. Eager as he was to carry her back forthwith to Wildwater, he knew that any show of force would serve only to deepen the girl’s hate of him. "She’s passing dear to the Lean Man, too," he muttered. "He’ll be loath to turn against her as it is—and ’twould only discredit the tale I have to tell him if I used force. Well, let her go. Haply she will not set eyes on Shameless Wayne." Yet twice he started in pursuit; and when at last she had dipped over the nearest hill-crest, his bitterness would not be held in check. "I offered her honest love, and she refused it," he cried, kicking the peat up with his heel in senseless frenzy. "God curse her, she shall not wed Wayne of Marsh till thistle-tops grow wheat." But Janet, swinging free across the moor, was strangely light of heart. The deceit that had lain between herself and Nicholas was to be lifted once for all, whatever might be the upshot, and there was no longer any secret by force of which Red Ratcliffe could press his suit. Not for a moment did she doubt that her cousin would fulfil his threat; the Lean Man’s wrath she regarded as awaiting her already at Wildwater, and she had learned not to underrate its fury. But by some means she would fight them, for her own sake and for Shameless Wayne’s; and she came of a stock to whom battle had ever been what the wind was to the storm-birds who hovered the year about the chimney-stacks of Wildwater. She would go straight down to Marsh, she told herself, and ask for its Master. The servants would wonder, doubtless, and the moorside gossip would be fed by the strange tale of how a daughter of the Ratcliffes had come to seek her people’s enemy; but what did gossips matter now that she had declared open warfare with her folk? There was a grim reckoning for her at Wildwater, and she did not shrink from it for her own sake; but Shameless Wayne must be kept out of danger’s way, and see him she must before returning if he had to be sought from Marsh to Cranshaw.