Not staying to fetch cloak and hood, Janet struck slant-wise across the moor soon as her grandfather was out of sight. Troubles were crowding thick on her. This morning there had been Red Ratcliffe’s threats, now there were the Lean Man’s. Both aimed against Shameless Wayne, she guessed, for of old their hate had been deeper against the Waynes of Marsh than against any other of their kin. Above the moor-edge a little cloud, no bigger than a man’s hand, seemed to have come up—the cloud of feud, which one day, the girl knew, would grow to a red thunder-track that covered the whole sky. Yet her step grew freer, her eyes brightened, as she went out and out across the moor, over the gaunt, waste land of peat and bog and green marsh grasses; for the friendship of heath went with her, and each step further into the heart of the solitude was a step toward him. This morning she had been downcast, and even the moor had failed to give her its wonted cheer; but now that dangers thickened she braced herself to meet them, with a courage that was almost gaiety. What if the Lean Man had gone hunting Shameless Wayne? He would not find him, for he was coming to meet her on the moor here—he was at the tryst this moment, may be—and the road he would take from Marsh was contrary altogether from that followed by her grandfather. The bog stretched wide before her now, and she had to skirt the nearer edge of it, stepping with cautious foot from tuft to tuft of ling. There was many a dead man lay among the stagnant ooze to left of her; but the cruelty of the heath had no terror for the girl—it was but one quality among the many which had endeared the heath to her. Men’s cruelty was mean, with squalor in it, but the larger pitilessness of Nature was understandable to this child of the stormwinds and the rain. Little by little, as she walked, her mind went over all that had passed between herself and Shameless Wayne since first he set a lover’s eyes on her and blurted out his headstrong passion. That was a twelvemonth back, and ever since she had been half betrothed to him—not pledging herself outright, but gleaning a swift joy from meetings that would have brought the Lean Man’s vengeance on her had he once surprised a tryst. Sometimes she had been tender with the lad, but oftener she had taunted him with his wild doings up and down the moorside; and all the while she had not guessed how close a hold he was taking of her, nor that his very wildness matched what the moor-storms taught her to look for in a man. It had needed a touch of peril, a sense that life for once was buffeting Careless Wayne, to rouse the woman in her; and now the peril was at hand, and the boy-and-girl love of yesterday showed vague and empty on the sudden.