"Don't tell me such things," she said. "They've been the ruin of me. And you must let me be miserable for a little while! It's all I can do for Basil. I think I'll go to bed." "Not yet. I told Bessie to light the fire." "But what extravagance!" "You don't come home every day," he said, and he spoke as though she had come on a far journey. Afterwards, when she lay warm and comforted in bed, he came to see her. He made up the fire, he altered the opening of the window by an inch, he felt the heat of the hot-water bottle, and hovered on the threshold to find more to do. "I wish I had a thermometer," he murmured. "I'm glad I broke it. I refuse to have my temperature taken. I'm much too sleepy. Good-night, dear. I'm so comfortable." "Good-night, my child," he said, and crept down the stairs in a great happiness of hope. CHAPTER XXVII Very late, on a dark and moonless night in March, when the larches were stiff and silent under the frost that bound the hills, and the air was of an imprisoned stillness, Janet, sewing by lamplight, heard a dog's bark cut through the quiet, and then hurried footsteps that were Alec's. Her fingers lost their steadiness for an instant, but as he opened the door she peered round the lamp and said sharply: "So you're here at last! You've not touched my doorstep for four weeks, and now you come at this time of night and expect a welcome! What made you think I would be up?" "I didn't think," he said. "I just came." He was within the circle of the lamplight, and she looked at him. He was frost-powdered from head to foot, from ruffled hair to heavy boots, and his eyes were dull in a face the whiter for the tan it had to conquer. She went on with her sewing: "Where have you been?" she said. "God knows." "That'll be why I didn't go to bed," she said quietly. "I've been walking since dark, nearly." He moved away into the gloom, and there he went back and forth, across the kitchen's width, with a restlessness like his father's. "And I've had the devil for company." "Well, you're here now," she said. The years had slipped away from her, and Alexander was the gloomy, passionate boy again, come to her for comfort, and she had a tremulous sensation of delight. "Ay, but the devil's here, too." "Had you not better tell me?" she said.