Brodrick, "for three months."

He rose and held out the hand of parting. To his surprise Winny kissed
him and kept her face against his as she whispered, "And _if_--she has
to stay a year?"

"She shall stay," Brodrick said.

LX

She went down to Devonshire, to a farmhouse not far from Chagford, on
the edge of Dartmoor. Tanqueray had rooms there which were his and
nobody else's, and he had lent them to her for three months, or for as
long as she cared to stay. She would be safe there, he said. Nobody
would find her.

Certainly it would be hard to find her, so remote and hidden was the
place. The farm, which was small and humble, stood in a deep lane cut
off from Chagford by a hill. The lane dipped abruptly from the hillside;
it plunged; it went down, at noon, as into a pit of darkness. The
white-washed house, lodged on a flat break in the descent, sucked light
through its high ring of ash-trees. Below it the lane went headlong to
the hill-bottom. It was perched on a hill, hugged in a valley, according
as you approached it from the north-east or the south-west.

The doorway was guarded by a deep, white-walled porch. You came straight
into an ancient low-roofed, white-washed kitchen, now the living-room
for the eccentric stranger who had made his lodging there. A stairway
led up from it into the bedroom overhead. This living-room had a door
that opened into a passage joining it to further and dimmer parts of the
house; but the bedroom was inaccessible save by its own stair.

By the deep-set window of each room there stood a firm, solid oak table,
at which, the woman of the farm had told her, Mr. Tanqueray wrote. Both
windows looked on to the lane. That was the beauty of it, Tanqueray had
said. There would be nothing to distract her. You couldn't trust Jinny
on the open moor.

For the first week Jinny, cut off from her husband and children, was
assailed by a poignant and perpetual misery. As one who has undergone a
surgical operation, she suffered an inveterate nerve-aching after the
severed flesh. She was haunted by Brodrick's face as she had seen it
from her corner of the rail-way carriage, looking in at her through the
window, silent and overcast, and by his look, his unforgettable look as
the train carried her away. And the children, their faces and their soft
forms and their voices haunted her. She did no work that week.

Then the country claimed her. Dartmoor laid on her its magic of wild
earth and