"I don't know what you mean, Mr. Lomax. Why should I treat him differently?"
"Because—well, being a woman, you know more than I can tell you. It seems a pity, that's all; he worries about things."
Greta dropped her air of aloofness.
"Gabriel Hirst," she snapped, "will never get rid of his preaching. If he was making love to a woman, he'd quote Scripture in the middle of it—and a woman doesn't want that."
"Well, no, she doesn't. But women were made to put up with things. Can't you get at the man in Gabriel, and let the preacher go hang?"
"I can do the last thing certainly. Good day, Mr. Lomax: you seem very anxious to get your friend settled in life."
The sun was dying bloodily behind Peewit House as Griff climbed the last stretch of rising ground. The clouds showed stormy. A dun mist hugged the skirts of the moor.
"This is cheery after the cold look of things outside," he cried, as he stretched his legs before the fire.
"It was kind of you to bother about the books: you will have a stormy walk back, I'm afraid." The trouble of contact with him weighed heavily on Kate for the first moment; she could scarcely find words in which to answer him.