"What do you want? Have you come to take me to Leo?" she mumbled.
"No."
"Then you can go away. I must find him myself." She, too, looked across the waste of snow, and shivered. "It's only a little way off, but the road is hid. I might fall in the snow and die; and Leo, for all his rough ways, would break his heart if he lost me." She was in one of her cringeing moods; her words came ramblingly, and dropped with the helpless fall of a withered leaf. "He'd break his heart if he lost me," she wailed.
"So he would," said Griff, with equal gravity. "Wait till he comes for you. I'll stay with you, if you'll give me something to drink."
Her eyes brightened as she clutched at his arm.
"Drink? How can I give you drink, when he—he, and she, the woman in there—lock it all up out of reach?"
"We can soon alter that. What's the nurse doing?"
She rubbed her hands together and chuckled softly.
"Fast asleep. After Leo went, her eyes were too tired to keep open. It isn't often she goes to sleep."
Griff followed her into the room, through the window of which he had first seen her. The nurse was half-sitting, half-lying in a long cane-chair near the fireplace. The peats were smouldering dully in the grate. Roddick's wife pointed across at her, but would not go near; when her quieter fits were on, she dreaded the great, raw-boned woman in the chair, who helped Leo to keep the drink from her.