"Here—bring some water!" cried Peter, too much relieved to see her to be surprised at it.

Tilly flung one wide-eyed glance over her shoulder into the room where young Realf lay, and dashed off for water and towels, while Pete fetched a piece of raw meat out of the larder.

It was a minute or two before Realf opened his swollen, watering eyes, and gazed up bewildered into the face of the woman he had said his prayers to for a dozen Sundays. She held his head in the crook of her arm, and wiped the froth and blood from his lips.

"Better now?" asked Pete.

Realf suddenly seemed to shrink into himself. The next minute he was swaying unsteadily on his legs, refusing the hands held out to support him.

"I\'m going home," he mumbled through his bruised lips.

"I\'ll t?ake you," said Pete cheerily.

But Realf of Grandturzel shook his head. His humiliation was more than he could bear. Without another look at Pete or Tilly, or at Reuben holding the raw chop to his eye, he turned and walked out of the room with bent head and dragging footsteps.

For a moment Pete looked as if he would follow him, but Reuben impatiently called him back.

"Leave the cub alone, can\'t you? Let him go and eat grass."

Tilly stood motionless in the middle of the room, her little nose wrinkled with horror at the bloodstains on the floor and at Reuben whose face was all bruised and swollen and shiny with the juice of the raw meat. Pete saw her shudder, and resented it.

"It wur a pr?aper fight," he declared. "You want to manage them feet of yourn a bit slicker, f?ather—but you wur justabout smart wud your fists."
 
Tilly\'s blood ran thick with disgust; she turned from them suddenly—that coarse, bloodthirsty, revolting pair—and ran quickly out of the room.

She ran out of the house. Away on Boarzell a man plodded and stumbled. She saw him stagger as the wind battered him, reel and nearly fall among the treacheries of the dead heather. He was like a drunken man, and she knew that he was drunk with shame.

All flushed with pity she realised the bitterness of his fate—he who was so young and strong and clean and gay, had been degraded, shamed by her father, whom in that moment she looked upon entirely as a brute. It must not be. He had been so good to her, so friendly and courteous in their Sunday walks—she must not let him go away from her shamed and beaten.

She gathered up her skirts and ran across the garden, out on to the Moor. She ran through the heather, stumbling in the knotted thickness. The spines tore her stockings, and in one clump she lost her shoe. But she did not wait. Her little chin was thrust forward in the obstinacy of her pursuit, and when she came closer to him she called—"Mr. Realf! Mr. Realf!"

He stopped and looked round, and the next minute she was at his side. Her hair was ............