Every evening the three Furlongers used to sit by the fire and stare into it. Len would sprawl back in his chair with his pipe, and the other two lean forward with needlework and newspapers and cigarettes. They seldom spoke--the wind would howl, and the shadows would creep, and the night drift on through star-strewn silences. At last some one would yawn loudly, and the others laugh--and all go to bed. Len was worried about Nigel and Janey, and usually devoted these evenings and their pipely inspiration to thinking them out in a blundering way. He was not a man given to problems, and hitherto life had held but few. It was an added bitterness that now his problem should be that brother and sister who had always stood to him for all that was simple and beloved. Nigel, in his strange fears, his subcurrents of emotion, and quickly changing moods, reminded Len of a horse; he did not object to drawing upon his knowledge of horses and their ways for the management of his brother. He humoured him, bore with him, but kept at the same time a tight hand--especially when the boy's seething restiveness and pain found vent in harsh words to Janey. Janey could not bear harsh words now--she had used to be able to pick them off and throw them back in the true sisterly style, but now she winced and let them stick. Janey perplexed Len as much as Nigel, and worried him far more. Her eyes seemed to be growing very large, and her cheeks very hollow. When she smiled her lips twitched in a funny way, and when she laughed it grated. Janey cost Len many pipes. The explanation of Janey was, of course, at Redpale Farm, sitting glumly by his winter fireside, just as she sat by hers. The love of Janet Furlonger and Quentin Lowe had entered on a new phase. Quentin was beginning to be dissatisfied. At first Janey had imagined that she would welcome this, but it did not come as she had expected. It brought their love into spasmodic silences. Up till then Quentin and she had always been writing and meeting, but now he wrote to her and met her in strange, sudden jerks of feeling. Sometimes he left her for days without even a line, but she could never doubt him, because when at last they met, his love seemed to burn with even greater torment and fierceness than in the months of its more regular expression. He began to give her presents, too--a locket, a ring, a book, which she shrank from, but forced herself to accept because of the evident delight he found in giving. Once more he was rambling restlessly and ineffectively on a quest for independence. His efforts always came to nothing, partly through his own incapacity, but always, too, through a sheer perverseness of fate, thwarting developments, wrecking coincidences--so there really seemed truth in his cry that the stars fought against him.