"Then straight home you come with me. Mother will look to it that you don't feed off skim-milk and a crust of bread. You'll preach to-night, Hirst—better than ever you did in your life."
Again the preacher tried to fight, but he was exhausted; he could only follow the lead of this overmastering pagan. Mrs. Lomax was sitting down to dinner when they came in.
"I had given you up, Griff," she said. "You are never to be depended on when once you get to the moors, and I was too hungry to wait. Gabriel, I am glad to see you; what have you been doing to your face? It looks like an old man's."
"He's been fasting, mother, and overworking himself. I put him in your hands; I don't think you will let him starve, much as he wants to."
"No, I don't think I shall," responded the old lady, grimly.
Gabriel Hirst's father and Griff's father had been close friends; dissimilarity of outlook upon every aspect of life had brought them together, just as it had brought the sons together. On both counts—the son's and the father's—Mrs. Lomax was warmly disposed towards Gabriel.
So he sat down, and ate meekly, as he was bidden, of strong meat and apple-pie and cheese. He drank two glasses of good red port; fain would he have asserted himself on this matter, but Mrs. Lomax reminded him of Timothy, and he was altogether too bewildered to do battle on a point of Scripture.
Greta Rotherson, when the preacher disappeared at the corner of the wood, had laughed a little, and frowned a good deal, and had finally put on her stockings and boots. "I wish he had never come," she cried. "It is such a quiet nook, and no one has disturbed me before. I like Gabriel Hirst, though, for all his hardness and his dangling of hell before poor old father's eyes. Hardness?" She laughed again at that, softly and musically; for she remembered how the preacher had looked at her a few minutes ago. "He only wants taking in hand by—by a woman who isn't afraid; he's not a fool at the bottom of him."
Then she tossed her hair back from her forehead and went briskly up the wooded cleft of the hills, until she reached a weather-stained corn-mill. The great wooden wheel was creaking intermittently on its axle, as if the jar and fret of work-a-day motion were more to its liking than this enforced Sabbath rest. Old Rotherson, the miller, with his iron-grey hair and shrewd, clean-shaven face, was smoking a churchwarden pipe at his door; the bees had deserted the heather once more in favour of his bit of a garden, and a peacock-butterfly was sunning itself on the house wall. It was hard to believe that the Storm-God had his temple so near to this sheltered cranny of the moors.