The old lady smiled at him, very tenderly and a little ruefully.
"You are a muddle of a man, Griff; I sometimes wonder how you manage to come through things as well as you do. First, you rush off on a harum-skarum prank the night but one after taking big responsibilities on your shoulders; then, you come to me with all kinds of suggestions for taking care of Kate; finally, you will leave us in the lurch, us two poor women, to fight out a trying time together."
"I'll stay, mother! It was your suggestion, to start with, that I should——"
"You can't stay," said Mrs. Lomax, quietly.
"Well, but you seem——"
"Don't bother me with logic, when I am suffering from feelings. Off you go, boy; you can trust me with your treasure-trove. Don't forget to put the beef on your eye; you have no idea what a fright you look."
So Griff was well on his way north by the time that Kate had opened her eyes and had wondered anew at the strangeness of her surroundings. Mrs. Lomax contrived an explanation of her son's early departure, not without sundry concessions to her principles of honesty, and the two women began their dreary, uneventful waiting time. There were legal delays, first of all; and when at last the case had come on for trial, and Strangeways had obtained the verdict of the court, there was a further wait until the decree could be made absolute. The interval, indeed, was then only half what it is to-day, but to Kate, in her present condition of nervous dread, three months seemed a veritable eternity.
It was a wretched winter, too, for Gabriel Hirst. He was troubled, to begin with, by the difficulty of reconciling Griff's innocence with his action in carrying off Kate Strangeways to the Manor. Griff had given his word that they were innocent, and innocent therefore they must be—yet, "it looked queer to a plain man's way of thinking." Then, Greta was becoming positively vixenish; the preacher's helplessness, his dog-like devotion, his womanish beating about the bush, got on the poor lassie's nerves at last, till she was driven, from sheer inability to bear it any longer, to follow Griff's example and migrate for a while to an atmosphere less strained. She met Gabriel as she was lumbering across the square that fronted the Black Bull, in the one rickety chaise which Marshcotes possessed.
"How do you do, Mr. Hirst?" she said, leaning out of the window and beckoning him to approach.