"Yes, damn you! why play the parrot to a beggarly statement of fact?"
Griff threw a couple of peats on a fire that needed no replenishing.
"Well," he said, settling back into his seat, "let us put away our worries, old man; we're getting morbid. Perhaps a talk about old times will do us good."
Roddick failed to notice a something that lay very near to the surface of the other's apparent carelessness; after chatting of this and that, he began to nod, then to doze; until finally he was sleeping as soundly as if there were no perplexities to be faced on the morrow.
But Griff had no inclination to sleep. He sat there, watching now the live peats, now his friend's face. As the dawn crept white over the white snow, he went quickly from the house towards a cottage called Bents Foot.
CHAPTER XXXI. THE MOOR MAN GOES OUT TO HIS OWN.
At the top of the rise that overlooked Wynyates, the chimney-stack of Bents Foot stood out, black and rigid as a funeral mute, against the grey-white of the sky. Griff plodded his way through the snow, till he stood at the cottage window. A figure was standing inside, its queer, distorted face pressed close against the glass. He motioned towards the door, and the figure fell back a little, so that he could no longer see anything more than a faint shadow moving up and down in the twilight of the room. He tried the door, and found it locked, as he had expected. But he felt no impatience; he only stood and looked out over the snow-sea, wondering at his calm and thinking it sanity.
After awhile he heard the sound of a key turning in the lock. Roddick's wife crept out, and came and peered into his face.