"Hold, lass!" he cried, gripping her arm. "I'll trick no secrets from thee now. Know'st thou I let another fight for me in Marshcotes kirkyard?"
"I heard as much a while back. And what said I to my heart about it, think'st thou?"
"That it matched well with Shameless Wayne."
"That it matched ill with what I would have the man I love to be--Ned, Ned, 'tis I am shameless, for I cannot see thy trouble and keep confession back. It was well enough to flout thee in old days, when thou hadst little need of me--but now--hast never a use for me, dear?"
The world had rolled back from Janet. Her folk were straw in the balance, the brewing quarrel was naught. They were alone, Shameless Wayne and she, with only the quiet, far-reaching moor to watch them; and love was a greater thing by far to her woman's eyes, than any hate of feud could be. Wayne reeled for a moment under a like impulse: he had come here to say farewell to Janet, expecting a little sorrow from her and no more, and she had met him with every tender wildness, of voice and eyes and roundly-moving bosom, that ever set a lad's hot pulses beating. Life was to be an uphill fight henceforth for Shameless Wayne; but here by the kirk-stone, with the peewits shrilling overhead and the low wind whistling in the heather, he was facing the hardest fight of all. Slowly the colour deepened in the girl's face as the moments passed, and still he made no answer and a touch of anger was in her shame, as she sought vainly for the meaning of his mood.
"Lass, why could'st not hold it back? Why could'st not?" he cried hoarsely. "Listen, Janet, there has that chanced at Marsh since yestermorn which has set the Pit of Hell 'twixt thee and me."
"What chanced at Marsh was none of thy doing, nor of mine," she broke in, and would have said more, but the look of Wayne's face, with the tragic lines set deep about his brow and under his eyes, daunted her.
"One of thy folk killed my father in cold blood," he went on, after a silence, "and in hot blood I swore never to ease my fingers of the sword-hilt until the reckoning was paid. Can we lie soft in wedlock, girl, when every dawn will rouse me to the feud? Can we lock arms and kiss, when slain men come from their graves to curse the treachery?"