In an hour they had reached the uplands and soon, at the top of a sylvan slope where there was shade and cooling air, Gerald saw a sign hung upon a sycamore tree, _The Black Dog by Nathaniel Crabbe_. The inn was small, pleasant with pink wash and brown paint, and faced across the road a large yard encircled by hedges, trees, and a gate. The travellers stood peeping into the enclosure which was stocked with new ladders, hurdles, and poles of various sizes. Amid them stood a tall burly man at a block, trimming with an axe the butt of a willow rod. He was about fifty, clad in rough country clothes, a white shirt, and a soft straw hat. He had mild simple features coloured, like his arms and neck, almost to the hue of a bay horse. “Hullo!” called the girl. The man with the axe looked round at her unrecognizingly. Orianda hurried through the gateway. “Father!” she cried. “I did not know. I was not rightly sure of ye,” said the man, dropping the axe, “such a lady you’ve grown.” As he kissed his daughter his heavy discoloured hands rested on her shoulders, her gloved ones lay against his breast. Orianda took out her purse. “Here is the money I stole, father.” She dropped some coins one by one into his palm. He counted them over, and saying simply “Thank you, my dear,” put them into his pocket. “I’m dashed!”—thought Loughlin, who had followed the girl—“it’s exactly how _she_ would take it; no explanation, no apology. They do not know what reproach means. Have they no code at all?” She went on chatting with her father, and seemed to have forgotten her companion. “You mean you want to come back!” exclaimed her father eagerly, “come back here? That would be grand, that would. But look, tell me what I am to do. I’ve—you see—this is how it is—” He spat upon the ground, picked up his axe, rested one foot upon the axe-block and one arm upon his knee. Orianda sat down upon a pile of the logs. “This is how it is ... be you married?” “Come and sit here, Gerald,” called the girl. As he came forward Orianda rose and said: “This is my very dear friend, father, Gerald Loughlin. He has been so kind. It is he who has given me the courage to come back. I wanted to for so long. O, a long time, father, a long time. And yet Gerald had to drag me here in the end.” “What was you afraid of, my girl?” asked the big man. “Myself.” The two visitors sat upon the logs. “Shall I tell you about mother?” asked the girl. Crabbe hesitated; looked at the ground. “Ah, yes, you might,” he said. “She died, did you know?” The man looked up at the trees with their myriads of unmoving leaves; each leaf seemed to be listening. “She died?” he said softly. “No, I did not know she died.” “Two years ago,” continued the girl, warily, as if probing his mood.