He ceased. Down the side of Roddick's nose a ridiculous tear was creeping, but Griff smiled, with a sort of paternal tenderness, on the two people for whom he had lately performed a trifling service.
"Old man!" cried Roddick. His voice was a woman's, inaudible almost in its desperate pity.
"Don't trouble about that," put in the other briskly, as if in answer to unspoken words of gratitude. "The least said, the soonest mended. You want to thank me, I know, and talk nonsense generally. I won't have it. Why, man, it's the easiest thing I ever did in my life!" On the sudden his face fell. He gibbered dumbly, like some voiceless ghost. "The moor, the moor," he whispered at last. "How still and white it is. It's not the moor I have known—not the moor I have loved my life through—it seems to shudder."
Still Roddick watched him. He could not break through the miserable, obstinate silence that hid his sympathy. Reason came back to Griff's face, and firmness to his voice.
"There are two pictures in my studio at Gorsthwaite. I seem to care so little for that sort of thing now, but I know they are good. Will you look after them, Roddick, old man? Send them out into the world; they are the best work I ever did—and Kate lives in one of them."
Janet had forgotten Griff while teaching herself to realize the glad news he had brought them. In the utter selfishness of her love, in the sudden lifting of a burden she had borne too long, she surrendered herself wholly to delight. Her joy grew intolerable; she had to cry aloud.
"Leo, Leo, you are mine, mine altogether!" she said, in a voice between laughter and tears.
But Roddick, thinking of his true friend in need, was silent. He turned his back on them, and leaned his forehead on the mantelshelf, and wondered what would be the end of it for Lomax.
And Griff, meanwhile, passed quietly out into the stillness of the moor.
THE END.