He opened the windows to the October night air. It was keen, with a hint of frost. The thinned leaves showed the delicate tracery of branches, black against the pale moonlit sky. The stars looked a very long way off. Utterly sick at heart, filled with self-contempt for his outbreak of temper, struggling in a miasma of disgust with life and all things in it, he leant against the window-sill; the keen cool wind seemed to cleanse and restore. A little well-known whine roused him, to find Vic scratching against his knee. He picked her up, and felt the small warm body curl against his own. She looked at him as only a dog can look, and, carrying her, he turned towards the dying embers of the fire and his easy chair. Then he stopped, remembering, noticing, for the first time, that Larry had not come back with him. CHAPTER XII North did not visit the farm again. He sent Ruth a brief line: “I am better away.” That he made no apology and expressed no thanks gave her the measure of his trust in her and her friendship. She answered his brief communication by one equally brief: “Try not to think of it at all if you cannot think the right way.” So North buried himself in his work, forced and drove himself to think of nothing else. Slept at night from sheer weariness, and grew more haggard and more silent day by day. At least if he could not be on the side of the angels he would not help the devils. The month was mostly wild and wet, with here and there days of supreme beauty. It was on one of these, the last day of October, that Ruth and Violet went, as they often did, for a long tramp through the wet woods and over the wind-swept hills towards the sea. The atmosphere was that exquisite clearness which often follows much rain. The few leaves remaining on the trees, of burnished golden-brown, came falling in soft rustling showers with each gust of the fresh strong wind. They had walked far, so far that they had come by hill and dale as the crow flies to where the fall of the ground came so abruptly as to hide the middle distance, and the edge of the downs, broken by its low dark juniper-bushes, stood before them, clear-cut, against the great sweep of coastline far away beneath. Pale gold and russet, the flat lands stretched, streaked with the sullen silver of sea-bound river and stream, to where, like a hard steel-blue line on the horizon, lay the sea itself. And behind that straight line, black and menacing, and touched with a livid ragged edge, rolled up the coming of a great storm.