"No, I don't know him."
The stranger was trying to realize a new point of view. Evidently the people of Ling Crag regarded themselves as one village, and the rest of England as another. They expected all South-country people to know each other, just as the landlord here knew Betty Binns, or Gabriel Hirst, or Dick the Cobbler. Such isolation took the stranger's breath away.
Another silence.
"I mind me that th' agent what looks after Wynyates Hall—an' a sight more property, too—comes here to-morrow to collect th' rents," said the landlord. "Him an' ye might come to an agreement."
"I think we might. What time is he due?"
"Fro' nooin onwards to six o' th' clock."
"Very well. Call me at nine, will you, and give me bacon and eggs for breakfast. It's high time we turned in."
The stranger took his candle and slowly mounted the stairs. As he went, he muttered softly to himself, "Such isolation—it is fatuous—it is magnificent. I have come to the right kind of place. Gossips, of course; but so there are everywhere. Do I know Miller Rotherson from the low country? Ha, ha!"
A draught at the stair-head blew out his candle, but the door of his room stood open, and a flood of moonlight came across the landing to show the way. He did not trouble to relight the candle, but clashed the door to after him and went to the uncurtained window. He had a clear view across the moors; one after another the dark rises swept to the broken sky-line, striding the misty hollows, till his eye caught that queer sense of endlessness which the moor people know from their birth. His face went grey as he watched, and through the greyness leaped a wild expectancy. Like a boy this man of forty stretched out his arms to the heath, and talked as if it had ears to hear him. "Janet—I wonder if you're there. In the heart of the moor, you told me—it must be down in one of those white hollows." Then he paused, and his voice went out again in one yearning cry of "Janet!"
The stranger pulled himself together. He laughed bitterly, as men do who have once safely passed these things and find it hard to have to go back again. Then he kicked off his boots, undressed, and lay for an hour on his back, watching the moon through the window. One boomed from Marshcotes church, and every hollow of the moors seemed to catch the sound, to pass it on, till the heath was to the already dozing man one everlasting succession of striking clocks.