All this went back and forth in the girl’s mind, and the feud took on a hundred different shapes each time she thought of it. It was the feud she had heard of since earliest childhood, the feud whose memory was grafted in by many a far-back legend and nearer tale of fight. Often and often in the happier years she had wondered, as a girl will, how the way of it would be if the quarrel broke out afresh: there had been deeds of high courage and glamour of sword-thrust to make her almost love the feud and count it noble; but now that it was on them, now that it hugged the very threshold, naked, terrible and brutish, she understood the reality and lost her dream-visions of the splendour and the majesty of fight. Fight meant gaping wounds, and blood upon the floor, and men going into the shadowy places when they were at the topmost of their strength. God knew that, if the choice were hers, she would cry peace once and for all and let the dead past rest. Yet her mood changed like the gusty wind that whistled now and then across the chimney-stacks. No sooner had she let that eager prayer for peace escape her, than her hands clenched themselves, and her eyes brightened, and the old vengeance-cry of her people rose hot to her lips. Let bloodshed come, and slaughter—and she would take new heart as one by one the Ratcliffes fell. Never in all the years that they had been together had the likeness between the dead man and his daughter shown more plain than now, as she laid her hand on his and counted his wrongs afresh. The pride of her race, its pitiless sternness when wronged, seemed gathered from the long-dead generations who had fought the Wayne and Ratcliffe fight aforetime; and the hate of the fathers woke again to splendour and to savagery in the slender-supple body of this last daughter of the line. She could sit still no longer, but got to her feet and crossed to the garden-door. The house-air stifled her; men fought under the open sky, and for that cause there was friendship in wind and sun and drifting clouds. Something like a prayer—a masterful prayer, and a bitter—rose to the girl’s lips as she stood and felt the keen wind in her face. "Keep warm my hate, Lord God!" she cried. A light footstep sounded from the hall behind her. She turned and saw little Mistress Wayne bending over her father’s body, with the same questioning, roguish air that she had worn last night. "Wake, wake!" Mistress Wayne was lisping in the dead man’s ear. "’Tis my wedding-morn, I tell thee, and all at Marsh must come to see it." Not touched at all was Nell by the piteousness of the scene. She remembered only what this woman had done, and forgot how hard a penance she was undergoing. "Get ye gone," she said, clutching her step-mother fiercely by the arm. "Is’t not enough that you have killed him, but you must mock him after death?"