His language, also, was that of his youth. "Janet, d'you mind when I wanted to kill him? D'you mind me telling you to wish him over a cliff side? Well, you've got to pay for all your evil, and I'm paying for mine this day." His boots on the stone floor marked the hurry of his thoughts. "It comes back on you when you think you've strangled it. I hated him, I would have laughed to see him dead, and then I learnt a thing here and there, and I wouldn't hate him any more. Well, I couldn't hate him. He seemed too poor a thing. He'd just got to be cared for like a child. And things went well with me for a bit, and there's no doubt but what I was pleased with the state of my soul. It's a pity man was ever taught the name of it," he cried violently. She sewed on. There was no sound but the rasp of her needle through the coarse stuff, for Alexander was standing still. "I thought I'd killed him this afternoon," he said, and moved on again. He spoke through the noise of his walking. "I cannot get it off my mind," he said, "that there've been men hanged for less than I did to-day. It's something beyond me that's saved my neck. It was as good as murder. I know how men feel when they've killed. I'll never get my hands clean of it. And while I've been tramping over these white hills that should have spurned me, I've felt like a man hunted, with that grisly death behind him. And I didn't know the rage was in me. I thought it died ten years ago, but it came back like a flood, and blinded me, and felled him. God! I'm nothing but a savage. I that thought myself walking a little above the earth! Well," he said grimly, "I'm learning yet!" "If you'll tell me----," she began. "But wait a bit. We'll have some broth. D'you know it's twelve o'clock? And you've school in the morning." He frowned heavily and pushed his fingers through his hair. "It smells good, and I'm hungry," he said. They sat by the fire, each with a bowl of soup, and Janet watched him as he drank. There were lines in his face that had not come there in a day. "These four weeks," she said, "I've waited for you every night. That's what women spend their time in doing. Your mother for James, and me for you. And you come running to us when you want us. And neither she nor I would have it different! But for all that, I'm not going to have you getting like your father, my man, running about the hills at night, and tumbling into a woman's lap!" He flushed, and tried to cover shame with emphasis. "You'll have my blood to change, then. It's black, Janet--black." "And that's like him, too! I'm this, and I'm that, and I'll never be anything else! Black blood! His isn't black--it's white! He's just a coward. He's never finished running away from himself, and crying out he cannot help it, and getting behind your mother's skirts. And all she should have done was to have skelped him well." "I'm willing to take my skelping, if you'll cure me." She laughed with a kind of girlishness that startled him.