"I suspect you want comfort," snarled Roddick. "I can give you that. There's a heap of fools in the same box with you, so you won't run a chance of feeling lonely. About how soon do you think of bolting for good and all?"
"Roddick, you're going a bit too far——" began Griff, hotly. But he caught a wicked light of satisfaction in the other's face, and made up his mind that he would not be guyed—"trailed," as they called it in Marshcotes—however much the amusement might give Roddick a vent for his ill-humour.
"I mostly am. Once I went very much too far, and—have some tobacco."
They smoked on in silence for awhile. Griff ventured a remark at length; his companion took no notice whatever, but went on frowning at the live peats in the grate.
"About that woman," said Roddick, finally.
"Which woman?"
"The thing you mistook for a vampire when you were last here. What did the pretty little beast do to you, Lomax, out there in the darkness?"
Griff shuddered; he had almost forgotten the incident under stress of the quick march of later events.
"She leaped out of the wind and rain like a storm-elf, and glued her flabby lips to mine, and called me 'Leo.'"