avely now.

"Naw," he said slowly, "'tis noon o' thawse things. It's mae. It's mae
yo're afraid of. Yo think I med bae too roough with yo."

But at that she cried out with a little tender cry and pressed close
to him.

"No--no--no--it isn't you. It isn't. It couldn't be."

He crushed her in his arms. His mouth clung to her face and passed
over it and covered it with kisses.

"Am I too roough? Tall mae--tall mae."

"No," she whispered.

He pushed back her hat from her forehead, kissing her hair. She took
off her hat and flung it on the floor.

His voice came fast and thick.

"Kiss mae back ef yo loove mae."

She kissed him. She stiffened and leaned back in the crook of his arm
that held her.

His senses swam. He grasped her as if he would have lifted her bodily
from the floor. She was light in his arms as a child. He had turned
her from the window.

He looked fiercely round the room that shut them in. His eyes lowered;
they fixed themselves on the bed with its white counterpane. They
saw under the white counterpane the dead body of his father stretched
there, and the stain on the grim beard tilted to the ceiling.

He loosed her and pushed her from him.

"We moost coom out o' this," he muttered.

He pushed her from the room, gently, with a hand on her shoulder, and
made her go before him down the stairs.

He went back into the room to pick up her hat.

He found her waiting for him, looking back, at the turn of the stair
where John Greatorex's coffin had stuck in the corner of the wall.

"Jim--I'm so frightened," she said.

"Ay. Yo'll bae all right downstairs."

They stood in the kitchen, each looking at the other, each panting,
she in her terror and he in his agony.

"Take me away," she said. "Out of the house. That room frightened me.
There's something there."

"Ay;" he assented. "There med bae soomthing. Sall we goa oop t'
fealds?"

* * * * *

The Three Fields looked over the back of Upthorne Farm. Naked and
gray, the great stone barn looked over the Three Fields. A narrow
track led to it, through the gaps, slantwise, from the gate of the
mistal.

Above the fields the barren, ruined hillside ended and the moor began.
It rolled away southward and westward, in dusk and purple and silver
green, utterly untamed, uncaught by the network of the stone walls.

The barn stood high and alone on the slope of the last field, a long,
broad-built nave without its towe