The world had rolled back from Janet. Her folk were straw in the balance, the brewing quarrel was naught. They were alone, Shameless Wayne and she, with only the quiet, far-reaching moor to watch them; and love was a greater thing by far to her woman’s eyes, than any hate of feud could be. Wayne reeled for a moment under a like impulse: he had come here to say farewell to Janet, expecting a little sorrow from her and no more, and she had met him with every tender wildness, of voice and eyes and roundly-moving bosom, that ever set a lad’s hot pulses beating. Life was to be an uphill fight henceforth for Shameless Wayne; but here by the kirk-stone, with the peewits shrilling overhead and the low wind whistling in the heather, he was facing the hardest fight of all. Slowly the colour deepened in the girl’s face as the moments passed, and still he made no answer and a touch of anger was in her shame, as she sought vainly for the meaning of his mood. "Lass, why could’st not hold it back? Why could’st not?" he cried hoarsely. "Listen, Janet, there has that chanced at Marsh since yestermorn which has set the Pit of Hell ’twixt thee and me." "What chanced at Marsh was none of thy doing, nor of mine," she broke in, and would have said more, but the look of Wayne’s face, with the tragic lines set deep about his brow and under his eyes, daunted her. "One of thy folk killed my father in cold blood," he went on, after a silence, "and in hot blood I swore never to ease my fingers of the sword-hilt until the reckoning was paid. Can we lie soft in wedlock, girl, when every dawn will rouse me to the feud? Can we lock arms and kiss, when slain men come from their graves to curse the treachery?" "Thou art thou, Ned, and I am I. Can kinship alter that?" "Ay, can it," he cried bitterly, for her stubbornness angered him when he looked for help from her at this hottest of the fight. "The one part of me is sick for thee, Mistress Janet, while the other loathes thee—ay, loathes thee—because thou art a Ratcliffe.—There, child, forgive me! ’Tis no fault of thine, God knows, and my tongue slips into unmeant cruelties——" She turned her back on him and leaned her forehead against the stone that had brought many a maid to her undoing or her happiness. Back and forth went her thought; she would not acknowledge how real his struggle was, but told herself that he had flouted her for sake of an idle fancy, that she could never win back what she had given him just now. She looked up at last, and glanced at Shameless Wayne. "Hast not left me yet?" she said. "’Tis scarce seemly, is’t, to pry upon my shame?"