"Thou art thou, Ned, and I am I. Can kinship alter that?"
"Ay, can it," he cried bitterly, for her stubbornness angered him when he looked for help from her at this hottest of the fight. "The one part of me is sick for thee, Mistress Janet, while the other loathes thee—ay, loathes thee—because thou art a Ratcliffe.—There, child, forgive me! 'Tis no fault of thine, God knows, and my tongue slips into unmeant cruelties——"
She turned her back on him and leaned her forehead against the stone that had brought many a maid to her undoing or her happiness. Back and forth went her thought; she would not acknowledge how real his struggle was, but told herself that he had flouted her for sake of an idle fancy, that she could never win back what she had given him just now. She looked up at last, and glanced at Shameless Wayne.
"Hast not left me yet?" she said. "'Tis scarce seemly, is't, to pry upon my shame?"
Anger he could have met, but not this tearless sorrow. If Janet could cast kinship to the winds, was he to show himself a laggard? He sprang toward her; and she, seeing his sternness gone, waited and held her breath, not knowing what she feared or what she hoped. And then he stopped, suddenly, as if a hand had clutched at him to hold him back; and without a word he turned and left her.
She watched him go, her arms clasped tight about the stone; and for awhile her heart went empty of all feeling. So quiet the moor was that she could hear the rustle of an eagle, sweeping far overhead toward Conie Crag Ravine, with a lamb in its talons plucked from some outlying upland field. A moor-fowl splashed through the reeds that fringed the marsh to left of her. The peewits wheeled everlastingly in dropping circles, showing white breasts to the sunlight at every backward turn. There was a vague, wandering sound that threaded through all the others—the gnome-like cries and gurgles of water running underground through straitened channels.
She thought of the frail figure which she had lately seen go up the brink-fields, and she asked herself, was she less lonely than mad-witted Mistress Wayne? A storm of passionate self-pity swept over her at the thought; and after that the calm of hopelessness.
Slowly as her passion waned, the girl understood that there was more than an idle lad's caprice underlying all that Shameless Wayne had said. It was no lover's quarrel, this, to be righted at the next tryst. Her folk were the aggressors in this new-born feud; but they were still her folk, and feelings that she scarce realised as yet could cloud her love, she knew, as already they had clouded Wayne's. She glanced at the kirk-stone again and shivered; it had spoken her false when it bade her count all things less than love, and the folk who had whispered soft secrets here—man to maid, and maid to man—were they not dead and buried long since, and their love along with them?
Her pride weakened, too, and she remembered that she had come here to warn Ned of the danger with which the Lean Man's malice threatened him. Full of pity for herself she had been; but now the pity was all his, as she looked down the winding sheep-track, and told herself that though he humbled her afresh, she would seek speech of him once more and tell him of the Lean Man's purpose. But Wayne was already out of sight and hearing, and she knew that to follow him was useless.
Scarce knowing where she went, she set off wearily across the heath. The moor's harshness was friendly to her mood, and she wandered on and on until, by the time she reached the Wildwater gates again, the sun was sinking into gloaming mist.