"Well enough—quite well, dear. Don't worry about her."
"She will fret about me a good deal. Be very careful of her, Griff; there are not many women in the world I should admit to be worthy of you. You see what a foolish mother I am."
Griff did not understand how it came about, but his tears were pouring fast on to the thin old hands. The mother ruffled away the hair from his forehead, and comforted him with a hundred soothing gestures, laid aside long ago with the end of his childhood. The dying strove to calm the living.
"Come, dear, come. I am an old woman, and I had to go some time. Don't fret so about it. I have had a good life, and you have been a good son to me, Griff. We might almost have been lovers, you and I, from the way we behaved at times."
She fell into a reverie, a little smile flitting now and then across her lips as she recalled this or that pleasant memory. And Griff went softly from the bedside; he could not bear up against the pathos of it all. But she heard his footfall, faint as it was, and called him back.
"Only a word, dear, and then you can leave me to sleep. The end won't be just yet, I think; you can come back for the good-bye. It is about the child. Don't be too fearful about it; don't hedge it round with carefulness, and shut out the fresh air from it. Kate will know what I mean when it comes. A baby, Griff—one's own baby—seems so wonderful, and frail, and precious, till one gets used to it. You must fight that down, and try to believe it will grow without being shut up in a glass case." She laughed, and her sharp old eyes fastened themselves on Griff with a touch of roguishness in them. "If any one asks how I died, boy, tell them that I died as I lived—trying to teach you good common sense. And—yes, tell them this, too—I died glad of my life, and proud of the grand old stock. You have the Lomax pride in you, marrow-deep: cling to it, Griff, and pass it on to your children."
A week later Griff stood in the wind-swept graveyard at Marshcotes. A bitter, roving gale chased the fallen leaves in and out among the tombstones. The parson droned his "ashes to ashes, dust to dust," but the sexton's scattered handful of earth was forestalled by the rattle of hail upon the coffin-lid. The moor would have none of man's tawdry symbols; it loved the dead too well.
And Griff took heart from the blustering weather. As of old, the heath was one with him in sympathy, and mourned, in its own wild way, for the fearless woman who was gone.
The old doctor passed an arm through his as he turned towards Gorsthwaite.