“Ess, but that’s not my way.  I ban’t wan to wait an enemy’s pleasure.”

“You won’t go to him, Will?”

“Go to un?  Ess fay—­’fore the day’s done, tu.”

“That’s awnly to hasten the end.”

“The sooner the better.”

He tramped up and down the bedroom with his eyes on the ground, his hands in his pockets.

“A tremendous thing to tumble up on the surface arter all these years; an’ a tremendous time for it to come.  ’T was a crime ’gainst the Queen for my awn gude ends.  I had to choose ‘tween her an’ you; I’d do the same to-morrow.  The fault weern’t theer.  It lay in not gwaine back.”

“You couldn’t; your arm was broke.”

“I ought to have gone back arter ‘t was well.  Then time had passed, an’ uncle’s money corned, an’ they never found me.  But theer it lies ahead now, sure enough.”

“Perhaps for sheer shame he’ll bide quiet ’bout it.  A man caan’t hate another man for ever.”

“I thought not, same as you, but Grimbal shaws we ’m wrong.”

“Let us go, then; let us do what you thought to do ’fore faither comed forward so kind.  Let us go away to furrin paarts, even now.”

“I doubt if he’d let me go.  ‘T is mouse an’ cat for the minute.  Leastways so he’s thought since he talked to ’e.  But he’ll knaw differ’nt ‘fore he lies in his bed to-night.  Must be cut an’ dried an’ settled.”

“Be slow to act, Will, an’—­”

“Theer! theer!” he said, “doan’t ’e offer me no advice, theer’s a gude gal, ’cause I couldn’t stand it even from you, just this minute.  God knaws I’m not above takin’ it in a general way, for the best tried man can larn from babes an’ sucklings sometimes; but this is a thing calling for nothin’ but shut lips.  ‘T is my job an’ I’ve got to see it through my own way.”

“You’ll be patient, Will?  ’T isn’t like other times when you was right an’ him wrong.  He’s got the whip-hand of ’e, so you mustn’t dictate.”

“Not me.  I can be reasonable an’ just as any man.  I never hid from myself I was doin’ wrong at the time.  But, when all’s said, this auld history’s got two sides to it—­’specially if you remember that ’t was through John Grimbal’s awn act I had to do wan wrong thing to save you doin’ a worse wan.  He’ll have to be reasonable likewise.  ’T is man to man.”

Will’s conversation lasted another hour, but Phoebe could not shake his determination, and after dinner Blanchard departed to the Red House, his destination being known to his wife only.

But while Will marched upon this errand, the man he desired to see had just left his own front door, struck through leafless coppices of larch and silver beech that approached the house, and then proceeded to where bigger timber stood about a little plateau of marshy land, surrounded by tall flags.  The woodlands had paid their debt to Nature in good gold, and all the trees were naked.  An east wind lent a hard, clean clearness to the country.  In the foreground two little lakes spread their waters steel-grey in a cup of lead; the distance was clear and cold and compact of all sober colours save only where, through a grey and interlacing nakedness of many boughs, the roof of the Red House rose.