And as a man might leave a woman to his uninteresting rival in the certainty that she will be bored and presently return to him, Rowcliffe left Gwenda to the earth and moon.  He sulked and was silent.

* * * * *

Then, suddenly, he made up his mind.

XXXI

It was one night in April.  He had met her at the crossroads on Morfe Green, and walked home with her by the edge of the moor.  It had blown hard all day, and now the wind had dropped, but it had left darkness and commotion in the sky.  The west was a solid mass of cloud that drifted slowly in the wake of the departing storm, its hindmost part shredded to mist before the path of the hidden moon.

For, mercifully, the moon was hidden.  Rowcliffe knew his moment.

He meditated—­the fraction of a second too long.

“I wonder——­” he began.

Just then the rear of the cloud opened and cast out the moon, sheeted in the white mist that she had torn from it.

And then, before he knew where he was, he was quarreling with Gwenda.

“Oh, look at the moon!” she cried.  “All bowed forward with the cloud wrapped round her head.  Something’s calling her across the sky, but the mist holds her and the wind beats her back—­look how she staggers and charges head-downward.  She’s fighting the wind.  And she goes—­she goes!”

“She doesn’t go,” said Rowcliffe.  “At least you can’t see her going, and the cloud isn’t wrapped round her head, it’s nowhere near her.  And the wind isn’t driving her, it’s driving the cloud on.  It’s the cloud that’s going.  Why can’t you see things as they are?”

She was detestable to him in that moment.

“Because nobody sees them as they are.  And you’re spoiling the idea.”

“The idea being so much more valuable than the truth.”

He longed to say cruel and biting things to her.

“It isn’t valuable to anybody but me, so you might have left it to me.”

“Oh, I’ll leave it to you, if you’re in love with it.”

“I’m not in love with it because it’s mine.  Anyhow, if I am in love I’m in love with the moon and not with my idea of the moon.”

“You don’t know how to be in love with anything—­even the moon.  But I suppose it’s all right as long as you’re happy.”

“Of course I’m happy.  Why shouldn’t I be?”

“Because you haven’t got anything to make you happy.”

“Oh, haven’t I?”

“You might have.  But you haven’t.  You’re too obstinate to be happy.”

“But I’ve just told you that I am happy.”

“What have you got?” he persisted.

“I’ve got heaps of things.  I’ve got my two hands and my two feet.  I’ve got my brain——­”

“So have I. And yet——­”

“It’s absurd to say I’ve ‘got’ these things.  They’re me.  Happiness isn’t in the things you’ve got.  It’s either in you or it isn’t.”