Nearly a week had gone since Nance came down from her ride on the moor, from the meeting with Will Underwood that had ruined one dream of her life for good and all. Each day that passed was more full of strain for those at Windyhough. They practised musketry together, she and Rupert and old Simon Foster; and the rivalry between them, keen enough, improved their marksmanship. At the week’s end Rupert was the best shot of the three; it was his way to be thorough, and to this business of countering Nance’s taunt—that she could not trust her men to guard her—he brought the same untiring zeal, the patience not to be dismayed, that had kept his faith secure against disastrous odds.

But as each short day closed in there was the return to the silence of the house at Windyhough, to Lady Royd’s wonder if her husband were lying dead in some south country ditch, to the yapping of the toy spaniel that harassed Rupert because, soul and body, he was tired of mimic warfare.

They had come home this afternoon from musket-drill, and Simon had left them in the courtyard. A little, sobbing wind was fluting round the gables, and the red light on the hills foretold, unerringly, that snow would come.

Nance looked up at the black front of Windyhough. The homeless desolation of the land took hold of her. She was cold, and tired of all things; and she sought for some relief, and could find none, save by way of the tongue that is woman’s rapier.

“What of your trust, Rupert?” she asked sharply. “A week ago—it seems half a lifetime—you said there would be some swift attack—you said that you had faith. Faith, my dear—I tell you it is cold and empty as the wind. Your only answer is—why, just your mother’s spaniel barking at you from within. Faith should know the master’s footstep, Rupert.”

He had been sick at heart till now. The answer had not come as soon as he had hoped, and his need was urgent; but the faith in him rose clear and dominant.

“You’re a baby, Nance. You talked of half a lifetime. I could wait so long in patience, knowing the Stuart, soon or late, would come to the good crowning.”

She glanced at him with impatience, with a certain wistful curiosity. “Does your creed go deep as that, Rupert? Mine does not,” she said, with her frank, bewildering honesty.

“My creed?” Rupert’s shoulders were squared in earnest now. He stood to his full six feet, and in his eyes was that look of the man who cannot be bought, or bullied, or flattered, from allegiance to the straight road ahead. “It goes deeper, Nance. What else? Faith! You seem to think it means only kneeling in a church, a woman’s refuge from the outside storms, a ball to play with, when the time seems slow in passing.”

“You will tell me more,” said Nance gently.

“I cannot. Go to Sir Jasper, who can use a sword; go to your father, who can fight and hunt and play the man wherever men are gathered. They kneel in church, Nance—and in the open roads they feel their swords the cleaner for it; they carry knighthood with them, so that clowns read it in their faces as they pass.”

“Who taught you this?” she asked.

He laughed, with the diffidence and self-contempt that always lay in ambush for him. “I dreamed it, maybe. You always said I was a dreamer, Nance—a fool, you meant, but were too kind to think it.”

So they stood there, in the cold and ruddy gloaming, and were helpless to find speech together. All that lay deep in Nance, secure beneath each day’s indignities, went out to this heir of Windyhough. His view of life was hers; his roots were in the soil, tilled lovingly by far-back fathers, that breeds the strong plants of chivalry. And yet—and yet he was so fitful in his moods, so apart from the needs of every day, so galling to the women who looked, as a matter of course, for their men to go out into the open.

And then, following some odd byway of memory, she recalled how grim and steady and reliant he had been that winter’s day—it seemed long since—when he had sent Will Underwood and herself down the moor while he prepared to fight out the quarrel with his younger brother.

“Rupert,” she said, seeking for some way of praising him, “you shot well to-day.”

“Yes,” he growled. “I outshot a woman, Nance—and a man who was crippled in every joint he owned. I take no praise for that. As men count shooting, I’m where I always stood—your patient fool, Nance.”

So they stood helpless there, one aching with the love he had—each day of this close companionship making Nance more lovable and more far off—the other stifled by her pity for this heir of Windyhough, who needed so little to touch his manhood into living flame.

And as they stood a horseman came clattering up. There was mud on his horse, so that none could have told whether it were roan or black or chestnut. There was mud on his clothes, and on his hands, and on his lean, strained face. As he reined up sharply, his gift of knowing faces and their records did not fail him.

“You’re Sir Jasper’s son?” he said. “I’m glad, sir, to meet you out of doors, for it will save me time.”

Rupert was aware of some sense of betterment. Dimly, and far off as yet, he saw the answer to his faith take shape and substance. “I remember you, sir,” he answered gravely. “You are Mr. Oliphant of Muirhouse, and once you—you praised my shortcomings. You—you helped me, sir, that night you came to Windyhough. You do not guess the debt I owe you.”

Oliphant, sick with hard riding, more sick with the disastrous news that he was bringing to the loyal north, halted for remembrance of that night when he had come to Sir Jasper’s and found Lady Royd and a slim, nerve-ridden lad who was vastly like his own dead self, buried long ago under the hills of fine endeavour.

“By your leave, sir,” he said, gently as if the pipes were sobbing for dead hopes, “I think you’ve pluck enough to hear bad news and take it like a soldier. All’s lost—at Derby—and the Prince’s men are coming north again.”

Nance went apart and put weak, foolish hands about her eyes. There could be no resurrection, she fancied, from this death in life that was meant by the retreat from Derby. But Rupert held his head up and looked at Oliphant with steady eyes. The blow was sudden and bewildering; this retreat cut deep into his faith, his certainty that the Prince could not fail to carry London; and his shoulders broadened to the burden, so that he carried it well—almost lightly, as it seemed to Nance.

“My father—he is safe, sir?” he asked quietly.

“Yes, safe; but his temper is like a watch-dog’s on the chain——”

“He’ll bite deeper when the chance comes.” Rupert was smiling gravely through his eagerness. “Mr. Oliphant, I—I dare not ask you what—what my father—and the Prince—and the Highlanders—are feeling.”

Oliphant set a rough hand on his arm. “Feeling? The whole route north is one long burial. I’ve seen battle, I’ve heard the wounded crying when the night-wind crept into their wounds, but I never met anguish as I met it on the road from Derby. My lad, I cannot speak of it—and the Prince among them all, with a jest on his lips to hearten them, and his face as if he danced a minuet—all but the eyes, the saddened eyes—the eyes, I think, of martyred Charles, when he stepped to the scaffold on a bygone January morning and bade us all remember.” Oliphant halted a moment. A fury, resolute and quiet, was on him. “By God, sir, some few of us are not likely to forget!”

And suddenly Nance sobbed aloud, though she had never learned the woman’s trick of easy tears. And about Oliphant’s face, too, a softness played. It was a moment for these three such as comes seldom to any of us—a moment packed so full with grief and tragedy that they must needs slip off the masks worn at usual times. They three were of the old Faith, the old, unquestioning loyalty. They had no intrigues, of policy or caution, to hide from one another. One of the three had been with the army of retreat, had felt the throb and pity that put a finer edge to the sword he carried; and two of them waited here at Windyhough, sending long thoughts out to help the wayfarers. And now there was an end, it seemed; and in the chilly gloaming their hearts met, caught fire, were friendly in a common grief.

As for Rupert, he felt his soul go free to prison; he was finding now the answer to the unhappy, ceaseless trouble he had undergone since childhood. He had been thrust aside by folk more practical and matter-of-fact; he had feared ridicule; he had heard men name him scholarly, and had retreated, like a snail into its shell, to the dreams of gallantry that were food and drink to him. But through it all he had kept one bridge against all comers—the bridge of his simple, knightly faith; and it is the big deeds such as this—wrought out in silence, so that none guesses them—that train a man for the forlorn hope, the sudden call, the need to step out into the open when there is no one else to face odds ludicrous and overwhelming.

It was Rupert who broke the silence, and his voice was deep and steady. “Mr. Oliphant,” he said, not knowing how the words came to him, “this may be for the best.”

So Oliphant, who was saddle-sore and human, snapped round on him. “By gad, sir, you are obstinately cheerful! Ride somewhere between here and Derby, and ask the Highlanders if all is for the best. I tell you I have seen the Prince’s face, and faith grows dull. He would be in London now, if he had had his way.”

Rupert glanced up to the moors, where the last tattered banners of the sunset fluttered crimson on the hilltops. And in his eyes was the look which any countryman of Lancashire, or any Highlander from Skye, would have known as “seeing far.”

“The Prince has not had his way,” he said, with queer, unhurried certainty. “You tell us he retreats as other men go to a ball. You say his heart is breaking, sir, and that he still finds jests. I know retreat and waiting—know them by heart—and the going is not smooth. If he can do this—why, he’s bigger even than my dreams of him.”

Nance understood him now; and Oliphant’s ill-temper ceased to trouble him. Here was one, bred of a soldier-stock, who had missed his way along the road of deeds; but to the bone of him he was instinct, not with the ballad-stuff of victory, but with the tedious prose of long, sick marches, of defeat carried with shoulders squared to any onset of adversity.

Oliphant laughed grimly. It was his way when feeling waded so deep that it was like to carry him away. “I’ve seen many countries, lad—have had my back to the wall a few times, knowing who stood by me and who found excuse to save his skin; but I never in my travels met one so like a man, round and about, find him in rough weather or in smooth, as—as the Prince, God bless him! The ladies up in Edinburgh—your pardon, Miss Demaine, but some of your sex are fools paramount—saw only his love-locks and the rest of it; but we have seen his manhood. There’s none like him. And he retreats because my Lord George Murray is mathematical and has captured the Scots prudence of the chiefs; and he’s still the great gentleman among us—greater now that he dances, not in Holyrood, but through the miry roads.”

Nance glanced up sharply. She was thinking of Will Underwood, who had killed first love for her with a clown’s rough hand. “If there were more men of your breed—and Rupert’s——”

“By your leave,” broke in Oliphant gruffly, “I think most of us are bred straight. The mongrels make such an uproar that you fancy them a full pack in cry, Miss Demaine. We’re not happy, not one of us three; but we carry a faith bigger than our hardships.” He turned to Rupert with surprising grace and charm. “My thanks, sir. I was tired before I met you, and now—my weariness is gone.”

The door of Windyhough was opened suddenly, and Lady Royd came running out bareheaded, and halted on seeing the horseman and the two on foot in the falling dusk of the courtyard.

“Rupert, I cannot find my little dog!” she cried.

Her elder-born smiled grimly. He was struggling with the need to stand firm against Oliphant’s disastrous news; and his mother came to tell him, in her pretty, querulous way, that her little dog was missing.

“Fido is in the house, mother,” he answered patiently. “We heard him barking at us when we crossed the courtyard.”

“Oh, it is not Fido. It’s the little black pug, Rupert. And she’s so delicate. An hour of this keen wind, if she is out of doors, might kill the poor, wee doggie.”

Oliphant of Muirhouse gave a muttered curse, for, to his finger-tips, he was a man, his instincts primitive when they were touched. Then he laughed gently, for his soul’s health, and got from saddle, and stooped to kiss Lady Royd’s hand.

“You do not know me, Lady Royd, in this dim light? I’m Oliphant of Muirhouse, and I bring Rising news.”

Sir Jasper’s wife put a hand to her breast. The movement was quick, and another than Oliphant might easily have missed it in this dim light; but now his task grew harder, for he knew that, apart from pet-dog whimsies, she loved her husband.

“Is he safe, Mr. Oliphant?” she asked, bridging all usual courtesies of greeting.

“Hale and well. I saw him three days since, and he sent messages to you, knowing I had errands here in Lancashire.”

Lady Royd, easy for the moment because her good man did not happen to be lying dead among the ditches of her nightmares, grew almost roguish. “And his heart, sir? Is it sound, too? There are so many pretty women in the south—I know, because I lived there once, before I came to these bleak hills that frighten me.”

Oliphant sought for some way of breaking news better left untold. “You to fear rivalry?” he said, in his low, pleasant voice. “Sir Jasper has known you all these years——”

“Precisely. And the years have left their mark. You need not dwell on that, Mr. Oliphant.”

“I meant that, to have known you all these years—why, it explains the lover-like and pressing messages he sent by me.”

So then Lady Royd was like a girl in her teens. “Tell me what he said.”

“No, by your leave!” laughed Oliphant. “He said so much, and my time is not my own just now.”

“How—how comforting you are, like Mr. Underwood, who finds always the right word to say.”

“I say it with a difference, I hope,” snapped Oliphant, too weary to hide old dislikes. “I’ve known Mr. Underwood longer than I care to remember. He’s a man I’d trust to fail me whenever the big hunt was up.”

Nance laughed suddenly. The relief was so unexpected and so rousing. “You’ve the gift of knowing men, Mr. Oliphant.”

“There, child!” broke in Lady Royd. “You must come to my years before you talk of understanding men; and even then, if I die in my bed at ninety, I shall never know why we find their daft ways so likeable.”

Oliphant, afraid to hurt a woman always, was seeking for some way to break his news. This wife of Sir Jasper’s was leal and tender, underneath her follies; and her husband was in retreat—in a retreat dangerous to the safety of his body, but more perilous still to the quick and fiery soul that had led him south with Prince Charles Edward.“He is in good health,” he said slowly—“but the Cause is not.”

“There has been a battle?” She was alert, attentive now.

“Yes—a battle of the Council-chamber, and the Prince was outnumbered. The odds were four to one at least.”

“I do not understand, sir.”

“Nor do I,” he went on, in a quiet heat of rage. “We were cavaliers all, dashing straight through England on the forlorn hope. All depended on looking forward. The chiefs chose just that moment to look back along the road of prudence. It is disastrous, pitiful. I dare not think of it.”

“So they—are in retreat?”

“That is my message to you. Sir Jasper wishes you to stay here at Windyhough. The march north will go wide of you, through Langton, and you’ll be secure here.”

Lady Royd stood very still in the wind that at another time would have made her peevish with longing for her warm south country. Her surface tricks, the casual littleness that had disturbed Sir Jasper’s peace, were blown aside. She was thinking of her husband, of all this Rising meant to him, of his heart-sickness and the hazards that were doubled now.

“I would God, sir, that he had bidden me go out to join him in retreat,” she said at last. “I shall be secure here, he thinks? House walls about one, Mr. Oliphant, and food to eat, and wine to drink—are they security? I’m weak and foolish on the sudden—I never understood till now that, where he goes, there is home for me. Shelter? I need none, except his arms about me.”

There are times—moments set thick with trouble, when faith and all else seem drowning in the flood—that compel us to struggle free of reticence. Oliphant of Muirhouse was not aware that there was anything singular or unseemly in this spoiled wife’s statement of her case. Nance answered to the direct appeal; for her own heart was bruised, and fragrant with the herb named pity. And Rupert, for his part, stood aside and gazed at his mother across the red, murky twilight, and wondered how it came that one of his dreams was answered after all. In face and voice and tender uprightness of figure, this mother of his was something near the ideal he had woven round her, despite her careless handling of him in the years gone by.

“Ah, there!” said Lady Royd, with a coquettish, gentle laugh. “Nance was talking not long ago of love and knighthood and all that—the baby girl!—and I rapped her over the knuckles with my fan. It’s a humdrum world we live in, Mr. Oliphant; and, by that token, you will come in to supper before you carry on the news.”

“Not even a mouthful and a glass of wine out here; as for coming in to the meal I crave—why, I dare not do it, by your leave. Sleep is waiting so near to me, to trip me up in the middle of my errand.”

She glanced at him, with the instinct that is never far from women to play the temptress. “You look so tired,” she said gently. “Surely your news will wait? A warm hearth, Mr. Oliphant, and the meal you need——”

“You said just now that house-walls and food and drink were of little consequence—unless you had strong hands about you.”

“But you’re strong of your hands already. And I am weak.”

“Yes,” said Oliphant, “passably strong; but it is each man to his trade, my lady. The hands I need—they greet me on the uplands, when my horse and I are so tired out that it is laughable. We get up into the roomy moors—our business lies in that sort of country—and the curlews go crying, crying, as if their sorrow could not rest since a Stuart once was martyred. And we gather up our courage, my horse and I.”

“You men,” she broke in fretfully—“your thoughts run always up the hills. And you find only the old feuds—a Stuart martyred near a hundred years ago, a king who’s earth and bone-dust by this time, as we shall be one day. It matters so little, Mr. Oliphant, when we come to the end of our lives—to the end of our singing-time.”

Oliphant of Muirhouse had learned the hardest of life’s lessons—a broad and catholic simplicity; and in the learning he had gained an added edge to the temper that now was lithe as steel. “King Charles is neither earth nor bone-dust,” he said pleasantly. “He is—alive, my lady, and he knows that we remember.”

“Remembrance? What of that?” asked the other lazily. “Just last year’s rose-leaves, sir, with the faded scent about them. By your leave, Mr. Oliphant, I thought you more workmanlike and modern.”

It was Rupert who broke in. “Remember?” he said stormily. “My father taught me just that word, when he used to come up into the nursery long ago, and play with us. He did not know then how—how like God’s fool I was to grow up, and he would tell me tales of Charles the First, how likeable and kingly he was always; how he’d have been glad to take his crown off, and live like a country gentleman, following field-sports all the day, and coming back to the wife and bairns he loved, to spend long evenings with them.”

Oliphant of Muirhouse felt pity stir about him. This lad—with the simplicity of one who was seeing far back along the years, scarce knowing that he was speaking his thoughts aloud—was a figure to rouse any thinking man’s attention. He was so good a soldier wasted.

“Then father would tell me,” went on Rupert, the passion deepening in his voice, “how the King was asked to leave it all; how he could have saved his life, if he had given his Faith in exchange, and how he would not yield. And then—father made it all so plain to me—the King went out from Whitehall, one bitter January day, and the scaffold and the streets were thick with snow, and he went with a grave, happy face, as if he had many friends about him. And he knelt awhile at the scaffold in decent prayer; and then he turned to Bishop Juxon, and said, ‘Remember!’ And then—black Cromwell had his way of him, for a little while.”

“My dear, that is past history,” protested Lady Royd, with petulant dislike of sorrow. “Of course he died well, and, to be sure, the snow must have added to his great discomfort; but we live in other times.”

“No!” said Oliphant, sharp as a bugle-call. “We live in the same times, my lady. The way of men’s hearts does not change. I’m tired, and not so young as I was; but your son has marshalled all my courage up.”

So then Rupert stood aside. His chivalry and hero-worship, like his love for Nance, were too delicate as yet, for lack of drill; and he was ashamed that Oliphant of Muirhouse should praise his littleness.

“Mr. Oliphant,” said Lady Royd, with her roguish, faded laugh, “you’re like the rest of my daft men-folk; you are all for remembrance of the days behind——”

“Yes. We take a few steps back, the better to leap forward. That is the strict method of leaping any five-barred gate. There’s been so much surmise about that riddle of ‘Remember,’ and Rupert here has made it plain to me for the first time.”

“‘Out of the mouths of babes,’” said Rupert’s mother, with a flippancy that was born of this long idleness at Windyhough, the long anxiety for the safety of her husband, whom, in some muddled way, she loved.

“He is no babe, by your leave. He is nearly a proven man, my lady, and I think God finds no better praise than that for any of us.”

It was all quick in the saying, this talk of folk who heard disaster sing down the bitter wind; but Nance, looking on and seeking some forward grip of life since Will Underwood had fallen by the way, was aware that Rupert had sounded the rally-call when all seemed lost. He was no longer scholarly, unpractical; from the background, with the murky gloaming round him, he was a figure dominant among them. And from that background he stepped forward, lightly, with self-assurance, because there was no pageantry about this game of sorrow, but only the quick need to take hold of the every-day routine of hardship.

“It might happen that the retreat came up by way of Windyhough?” he asked, straightening the scholarly stoop of his shoulders.

Oliphant looked gravely at him—measured him, with an eye trained to quick judgment of a man—and dared not lie to this son of Sir Jasper’s who stayed here among the women, seeking better work. “There’s no chance of it,” he said gruffly. “They are taking the Langton road. I—I am sorry, Rupert. I wish the thick of it were coming this way. You’re in need of exercise, my lad.”

And Rupert laughed suddenly. “Mr. Oliphant,” he said, with his quiet, disarming humour, “I’ve had drill enough—a useless sort of drill—and I’m praying these days for assault, and musketry, and siege—anything to save us stay-at-homes from sleep.”

Oliphant looked down at the years of his own misshapen boyhood, saw himself a weakling, unproven, hidden by the mists of his own high desires. And he gripped Rupert’s hand, said farewell to Lady Royd, and got to saddle.

“Is that all?” asked Rupert, with sharp, disconsolate dismay. “Take me with you, sir. There’s a broken-winded horse or two still left in stable.”

“I obey orders,” snapped Oliphant, with brusque command. “You will do no less, and Sir Jasper was exact in his wish that you should guard the women here.”

Rupert was sick at heart, restless to be in the open, lest faith and courage were killed outright by these stifled days at Windyhough.

“They’re safe, you tell me,” he said, yielding to the queer, gusty temper that few suspected in him. “Then I’m free to breathe again. With you, or without you, I shall join the Rising at long last.”Oliphant’s heart went out to the mettle of this ill-balanced, stormy lad. For there are many who are keen to follow victory at the gallop; but Oliphant was a man who knew his world—knew it through all its tricks of speech and manner—and he had met few who were eager to ride out along the unsung, unhonoured road where retreat goes slowly through the mire.

“You know what this retreat means?” he asked, in the same sharp tones, as if on parade. “Sullen men, and sullen roads, and northeast winds that cut the heart out of a man’s body? Hard-bitten soldiers find it devilish hard to follow, Rupert—and there are the pipes, too, to reckon with. These daft Highland bodies will ever go playing ‘The Flowers of the Forest,’ till the pity of it goes up and down the wind, like Rachel seeking for strayed children. It is all made up of emptiness and sorrow, I tell you, this road from Derby.”

“I should go from worse emptiness and sorrow, here at Windyhough,” said Rupert stubbornly. “I fear house-walls, Mr. Oliphant, and the foulest road would seem easy-going——”

Oliphant broke sharply in. This was his own feeling, but it was not the time to give sympathy to Sir Jasper’s heir. “You come of a soldier-stock, lad. You want to learn soldiery one day? Well, you’ll learn it—I’ve trust absolute in that—and you begin to-night.”

“Then I’ll go saddle,” said Rupert, eager to try a second fall from horse again.

“No, by your leave!” snapped Oliphant. “You’ll play sentry here. Your orders are precise. You guard the house and women, as Sir Jasper bade you.”

“Because Sir Jasper knew that no assault would come,” said Rupert, with a return of the old heartache. “You leave me as you found me, sir—a toy soldier guarding a house that could only tempt fools to capture it.”

Oliphant straightened himself, clicked his heels together. His voice was tired and husky, but precise. “Your officer commands. You obey. What else? Men do not question at these times.” Then, with sudden understanding of the man he had to deal with—with some remembrance of his own rebellious and lonely boyhood—Oliphant stood, rugged and uncompromising, a lean, hard six-foot-two of manhood. “To your post, sentry!” he said sharply.

And Rupert found his heart leap out to the command. Instinctively—because breed shapes us all—he lost the scholarly stoop of shoulders, lost his ill-temper and loneliness. He saluted stiffly. And Oliphant got to horse, and was riding, slowly forward, when Lady Royd ran to his saddle.

“I have the most dismaying curiosity, Mr. Oliphant,” she said, lifting the pretty, faded face that would always keep its charm. “It is the woman’s curse, they tell us. What did King Charles mean when he said ‘Remember’? We’ve been guessing at the riddle for a hundred years or so, and it still baffles us.”

Oliphant glanced up at the roomy hills, at the red snow-gloaming that was dying slowly round their crests. “What did he mean—that day he went to death? No words could tell you. It was something high, and strong, and lasting, like your moors up there.”

“Oh, no; that could not be. He was so full of courtesy, so gentle—so like the warm south-country I left long ago. King Charles, sir, was never like these hills that frighten me.”

Oliphant looked down at her, with some pity and a great chivalry. “You hold the woman’s view of him,” he said, with the simplicity inborn in him. “As a man sees him, Lady Royd, he did what few among us could. His wife and bairns were pulling him back from the scaffold—and he loved them; his ease, his love of life, his fear of the unknown—all were against him. He could have saved the most comely head in England, and would not, because his faith was stubborn. By your leave, I bow my head when the thought of Martyred Charles goes by me.”

Lady Royd looked at this man, so hard of body, so tired and resolute. “I thought you practical, Mr. Oliphant.”“None more so. I’m a Scotsman,” he put in, with a laugh that struck no discordant note. “If it had not been for King Charles, I should not be here—riding evil roads as if I danced a pleasant measure.”

“You’re beyond me, sir; but then, men always were. They never seem to rest; and when the wind blows keenest, they run out into it, as if it were warmer than the fireside.”

“And there the secret’s out. That was King Charles’s meaning when he bade all Christian royalists remember. It was your son who explained it all to me just now.”

“Ah, Rupert! The poor boy dreams too much. You’re indulgent, Mr. Oliphant.”

They fell silent, as people do when feeling throbs and stirs about them like thunder that is brewing up, but will not break. And Oliphant, out of this thunder-weather that he knew by heart, found sudden intuition. Sir Jasper’s wife had not followed him to learn what the last message meant of a King dead these hundred years; she had sought cover, as women do when they are harassed, had waited till she found courage to ask the question that was nearest to her heart.

“You’re thinking of your husband, Lady Royd?” he said, with blunt assurance. “I shall see him soon, if all goes well, and I shall tell him—what?”

Women undoubtedly are as Heaven made them, a mystery past man’s understanding. Lady Royd, deep in her trouble, chose this moment to remember how Sir Jasper had wooed her as a girl—chose to grow younger on the sudden, to carry that air of buoyancy and happiness which makes the tired world welcome all daft lovers. “You’ve read my heart, sir, in some odd way. My husband—I cannot tell you what he means to me. I was not bred to soldiery. I—I hated the sword he carried out with him, because sharp steel has always been a nightmare to me, and he was cruel when he bade me buckle it on for him.”

“As God sees us, he was kind,” broke in Oliphant, moved by extreme pity for this spoiled wife who had fallen on evil days. “He loves you. The summons came. It was for your sake—yours, do you not understand?—that he kept faith with the Prince.”

“For my sake—he could have stayed at home. I—I needed him. I told him so.”

Oliphant was so tired that even compassion could not soften the rough edge of his temper. “And if he’d stayed? You would have liked your tame cat about the house? You’d have fussed over him and petted him—but you’d never in this life have found the medicine to cure his shame.”

“Oh, there!” said the other fretfully. “You worship honour. It is always honour with you men who need excuse for riding far away from home.”

“Honour?” snapped Oliphant, eager again for the relief of miry roads and saddle-soreness. “It is the Prince’s watchword. His heart is broken—or near to it—and honour is the one light left him. It keeps him gay, my lady, through fouler trouble than you or I have strength to face. And so—good-night, I think.”

“No, no! We must not part like this. I—I am so foolish, Mr. Oliphant—and you are angry——”

“Your pardon,” he said, with quick and gay compunction. “It was my temper—my accursed temper. I’m too tired just now to keep a tight rein on the jade.”

“Ah, there! You were always generous. It is a quality that keeps men lean, I notice.” She looked him up and down, again with the hint of coquetry that became her well. “It is a gallant sort of leanness, after all. For myself, I’m growing—a little plump, shall we say?”

“More graceful in the outline than myself. I was always a figure to scare corbie-crows away with.”

Sir Jasper’s wife, from the depth of her own trouble, knew how weary and in need of solitude he was. She wondered that he could keep up this game of ball—nice coquetry and chiselled answer—when all the sky was red about the moor up yonder, and all the hazard of retreat was singing at their ears.

“You will see my husband soon?” she said softly. “I—I have a message for him——”

“My trade lies that way. You can trust me with it.”

“You may tell him that I—I miss him, sir; and if he seems to miss me, too—why, go so far as to say that my heart is aching.”

Oliphant, moved by a gust of feeling, stooped to her hand. “I never had a wife, myself. God was not kind that way. I’ll take your message, and Sir Jasper will forget the miry roads, I think.”

He rode out, a trim, square-shouldered figure, carrying hardship as a man should. And Lady Royd, because he reminded her of the husband whose memory was very fragrant now, went down to the gate, and watched horse and rider merge into the gloaming. And, long after they were out of sight, she stood and listened to the tip-tap of hoofs, faint and ever fainter, down and up the track that was taking Oliphant along his road of every-day, hard business.

Behind her, Rupert and Nance Demaine were standing, facing each other with mute dismay. Without knowing that they were eavesdroppers, they had heard Lady Royd’s voice, with its half-pleasant note of querulousness, and the rider’s low, tired answers to her questions. And they had not heeded overmuch—for each was busy with the ill news brought from Derby—until, merciless, exact, they heard across the courtyard Oliphant’s rough, “And if he’d stayed? You would have liked your tame cat about the house?”

Nance had looked sharply up at Rupert, had seen his soldierly, straight air desert him, and she understood.

“My dear,” she said, broken up by sharp sympathy, “he—he did not mean that you——”

“So you, too, fit the fool’s cap on? I’m going indoors, Nance—to my post, to find Simon Foster.”

He was hard hit; and the strength of the fathers stiffened his courage, now in the hour of shame, so that he was almost gay. And Nance could make nothing of this mood of his, because she was born a woman, and he a man.

“You always brought your troubles to me, Rupert,” she pleaded, laying a hand on his sleeve.

“Yes, till they grew too big for you. And now—why, Nance, I think I’ll shoulder them myself.”

He seemed to stand far away, not needing her. It seemed, rather, in this moment of despair, that she went in need of him. Will Underwood had deserted her, had trodden her first love underfoot; she was bruised and tired; and the Rising news was wintry as her loneliness.

Rupert, his voice firm again, turned at the porch. “Good-night, Nance,” he said, with the gaiety that hurt her. “You may sleep well—the tame cat guards the house, my dear.”

There was bitterness and heartache about this house of Windyhough. The wind would not be still, and men’s sorrows would not rest. And the stark moor above lay naked to the wintry moon, and shivered underneath her coverlet of sleet.

Nance, by and by, followed Rupert indoors, and went into the parlour, with its scent of last year’s rose-leaves, its pretty, useless ornaments, its air of stifled luxury, warring with the ruddy gloaming light that strode down from the moors and peeped through every window, as if to spy out the shams within doors.

She sat down to the spinet, and touched a mellow, tender chord or two; and then, because needs must, she found relief in song. Her singing voice was like herself, dainty, well-found, full of deep cadences where tenderness and laughter lurked. It was no voice to take the town by storm, but one to hearten men, when they came in from the open, against the next day’s warfare. And she sang Stuart songs, with a little lilt of sorrow in them, because of Oliphant’s news from Derby and because of Will Underwood’s sadder retreat from honour, and hoped somehow that Rupert would hear her and come to her, because she needed him. He was so fond of ballads—those, most of all, that had the Stuart constancy about them—and Nance was sure that she could entice him down, could sing some little of his evil mood away from him.

Instead, as she halted with her fingers on the keys, she heard Rupert tramping overhead, and Simon Foster’s heavy footfall, as they went their round of what, in irony and bitterness, they named the defences.

“This loophole covers the main door, Simon,” she heard Rupert say, with his tired laugh. “In case of a direct attack from the front, I station myself here with six muskets, aim sure and quickly, picking my man carefully each time, and disorder them by making them think we are in force.”

“That’s so, master,” growled Simon. “And while you’re busy that way, I make round to the left wing, and get a few shots in from there across the courtyard. Oh, dangment!” he broke off. “We have it all by heart, and there’s only one thing wanting—the attack itself. I’m nigh wearied o’ this bairn’s play, I own. It puts me i’ mind, it does, of Huntercomb Fair, last October as ever was.”

“What happened there?” asked Rupert, as if the other’s slow, unhurried humour were a welcome respite.

“Well, they were playing a terrible fine piece where soldiers kept coming in, and crossing th’ stage, till you counted ’em by scores. But, after I’d seen what was to be seen, I went out; and I happened to go round by the back o’ the booth, and I saw how it was done. There were just five soldiers, master—one was Thomas Scatterty’s lad, I noticed, who’s said to run away from a sheep if it bleats at him—and these durned five, why, they went in at one end o’ the booth, and marched across th’ stage, and out a t’other end. Then they ran round at th’ back, and in again; and so it went on, like, till th’ sweat fair dripped from them, what with hurrying in and out.”

Nance, listening idly, could hear that low, recurrent laugh of Rupert’s—the laugh that was tired, and hid many troubles.“Yes, Simon, yes,” he said, with high disdain of himself and circumstance, “it is all very like Huntercomb Fair; but at Huntercomb they had the jostling crowd, the lights, the screech of the fiddles. Here at Windyhough we have—just silence—a silence so thick and damnable, Simon, that I’m praying for a gale, and fallen chimney-stacks, and the wind piping through the broken windows.”

“Aye, you were ever a dreamer. The dreamers are all for speed, and earthquakes, and sudden happenings. Life as it’s lived, master, doesn’t often gallop. It creeps along, like, same as ye and me are doing, and keeps itself alive for fear of starving, and gets up, some durned way or another, for th’ next day’s work. Well, have we done, like, or must we finish this lad’s game?”

And then Nance heard a sharper note in Rupert’s voice. She had heard it once before, that day he fought with his brother on the moor because he thought her honour was in question. “We finish, Simon. What else?”

“Now you’re at your faith again, master. I can hear it singing like a throstle. Well, I’m a plain man myself, asking plain proof. Just as man to man—and want o’ respect apart—has your pretty, gentleman’s faith done much for you?”

“Yes,” said Rupert, unexpectedly. “It has given me pluck to see this business through. A houseful of women and cripples—my father taking all the burden on his shoulders while I skulk at home—dear God! I’d be in a coward’s grave by now, Simon, if faith had not stood by me.”

“Then there’s summat in it, after all?”

“It is powder in the musket,” said Rupert, as if there could be no further argument. “No more, no less. But you and I, Simon, have to find the spark that fires it.”

Nance heard them pass overhead, heard the sound of Simon’s heavy boots die along the corridor. And she turned again to the spinet, and her fingers moved up and down the keys, their colour mellowed by long service, and played random melodies that were in keeping with her thoughts—not Stuart airs, because these asked always sacrifice, and the big heart, and the royal laugh that comes when things go wrong in this world.

Nance was too tired to-night for the adventurous road. To-morrow she would be herself again, eager, resolute, prepared for the day’s journey. But just now she needed the sleep, that stood far away from her; needed some charitable, firm voice to tell her she was foolish and unstrung; needed Rupert, as she had not guessed that she could lack any man. And Rupert had tramped overhead, concerned with make-believe defences.

“Oh, he does not care!” she said, believing that she hated him. “Simon Foster, crippled in both legs, and musty loopholes, and powder that he’ll never use—they’re more to him than all this heartbreak gathering over Windyhough.”

Into the scented room, with its candles shining from their silver sconces, Lady Royd came, tremulous and white of face, from watching Oliphant of Muirhouse ride out.

“Nance, my dear, I—I am tired,” she said.

“I think we all are,” Nance answered, rising from the spinet with a deference that had no heart in it.

“Oh, you’re querulous, and so am I,” said the other, with a shrewd glance at the girl’s face. “If our men could see us now—our men who fight for us—they would be astonished, Nance. We’re so little like their dreams of us. You in a bad temper, and I ready to cry if a mouse threatened me, and our men, God bless them! thinking only of old England, and our beautiful bright eyes, Nance—your eyes and mine—just red, my dear, if you’ll forgive me, with the tears men think our luxury.”

Nance, made up of hill-rides, and free winds, and charity, looked quietly at Lady Royd, read some fellowship in the pretty, faded face. “I have—a few griefs of my own,” she said, with the sudden penitence that was always like April’s sunshine after rain. “I forgot that you had yours.”The older woman grasped Nance’s hand, and held it, and looked into the young, faithful eyes. She needed youth just now; for she felt that she was growing old.

“Nance, he is out with the Rising. And they’ve retreated. And—and, girl, when you come to my age, and have a husband and a son who will go fighting for high causes—oh, you’ll know, Nance, how one’s heart aches till it goes near to breaking.”

“You will tell me,” said Nance, laying a gentle hand on the other’s arm.

And Lady Royd looked gravely at her for a moment, through the tears that lay thick about the babyish, blue eyes. And then she laughed—with gallantry and tiredness, as Rupert had laughed not long ago when he listened to Simon Foster’s tale of Huntercomb Fair.

“My dear, I should be glad to tell you—if I could. How should I find words? I’ve loved him for more than six-and-twenty years, Nance, and guessed as much long since, but was never sure of it till he rode out. And now—he’s in the thick of danger, and I cannot go to him.”

“He is happy,” said Nance, with stormy wish to help this woman, stormy grasp of the courage taught her by the hills. “Our men are bred that way; they are happiest when they’re like to lose their necks—in the hunting-field, or on Tower Hill, or wherever the good God wills. I think Sir Jasper is happier than you or I.”

“That is true.” Lady Royd made the most of her slender height. She was learning the way of royalty at last, after Sir Jasper had tried patiently to teach it to her all these years. “And I? My heart is breaking, Nance; but I’ll carry my wounds as—as he would carry his. They’re in retreat, I tell you, and—and we shall not meet again, I think—I, and the husband whom I love.”

“Oh, you will meet—and—and, if not——” said Nance, with that nice handling of high faith and common sense which made her charm so human and so likeable—“you love him, and his one thought is for you; and Rupert would tell you that death is so little, after all.”

“I suppose it is,” said Lady Royd, with a petulant shrug of the shoulders; “but it is tiresome of you, Nance, to remind one of the end of all things pleasant. Oh, by your leave, my dear, no talk of faith! I’ve had no other food to live on these last months, and I need a change of diet, girl, need—just my man’s arms about me, and his voice bidding me take heart again. I tell you, we’re not strong, we women, without our men to help us.”

Nance remembered her liking for Will Underwood, the shameful end of it; remembered Rupert, tramping overhead not long ago with Simon Foster and disdaining all the songs that should have brought him to her side. And her grasp of life grew firmer on the sudden. It was true, as spoiled, wayward Lady Royd had said, that women, since the world’s beginning, need the strong arms of their men about them.

Simon Foster, meanwhile, had done his round of the house, had said good-night to Rupert; and afterwards he had gone down to the kitchens, his step like a lover’s. He did not find Martha there, and answered the sly banter of the women-servants by saying that he needed to cross to the mistals, to see how the roan cow, that was sick of milk-fever, was faring.

“You’ll find Martha there,” said a pert scullery-maid; “and I’m sorry for the roan cow, Simon.”

“And why?” asked Simon, tired long since of all women except one.

“Well, you alone—or Martha alone—you’re kindly with all ailments. But, put the two o’ you together—within kissing distance—and the roan cow must learn to bellow if she needs be heard.”

Simon Foster turned about. He was the lone man fighting for his liberty. “I’m fair blanketed with women these days,” he growled. “Their lile, daft ways go meeting a plain man at every turning of the stairs.”“One maid’s lile, daft ways have sent your wits astray, Simon,” purred his adversary.

Simon straightened his bent shoulders. The young light was in his eyes again. He looked comely; for a man at bay shows always the qualities that are hidden by sleek prosperity. “Well, yes,” he said; “but Martha happens to be worth twenty of you silly kitchen wenches—that’s why I chose her.”

The pert maid took up a clout from the table, aimed it at Simon, and missed him by three feet or so.

“The master could teach you a lesson,” he chuckled. “We’ve been up the pastures these days, shooting. And master has got a bee in his bonnet, like, about this gunshot business. ‘Simon,’ he says to me, no further back than yesterday, ‘there’s nothing matters, except to see straight and to aim straight. We may be needed by and by.’”

It was so that Simon got away, and went out a conqueror for his little moment, because he had silenced the strife of women’s tongues. Across the darkness of the mistal-yard a lanthorn came glimmering fitfully, as Martha crossed from the byres to the house.

“Well, Martha?” said Foster, striding into the flickering belt of light.

“Well, Simon?” she answered, without surprise. She was no lass in her teens, to think that grown men welcome fright; and so she did not scream, sudden as his intrusion was.

“I’ve been thinking, lass.”

“And so have I. The roan cow is easier, thanks to me; and all the while I put the salt-bags on, and cosseted her, and teased her back to health, I thought a deal, Simon.”

“What, of me?” he asked, with a sprightly air.

An owl, far down the sloping fields, sounded her call as she swooped to kill rats and field-mice for her larder. And Martha, though the light from her lanthorn was dim enough to hide it, could not forego a touch of coquetry.

“Of you?” she laughed, setting a finger to her dimpled cheek. “Hark to yond owl. You’re all alike, you hunting-folk; you’ve the masterful, sharp voice with you.”

“Seems somebody has got to be masterful these days. I’ve driven sheep to market, and I’ve tried to drive pigs, and I’ve handled skew-tempered horses; but for sheer, daft contrariness, give me a houseful o’ women, with few men to guide ’em.”

“You’re not liking women these days?” said Martha tartly.

“Aye, by ones or twos. It’s when they swarm about a house, like a hive o’ bees, that lone men get feared, like, o’ your indoor fooleries. Anyway, Martha, I wish I were out with Sir Jasper—just as Master Rupert does.”

“And you talked of—of liking me—not so very long since.”

“Aye, and meant it; but how’s a man to find speech wi’ the one lass he wants, when yard and kitchen’s filled wi’ women he’s never a need for?”

“Well, that’s how I feel,” said Martha, unexpectedly. “Women are made that way, Simon; they’re silly when they herd too thick together.”

“There’s like to be a change before so very long,” put in the other hurriedly, as if he talked of the next day’s ride to market. “It seems this bonnie Prince they make such a crack of has turned back from Derby. And we’re near the line they’ll take, Martha; and, please God, there’s a chance the fight will come Windyhough way.”

“And you’ll be killed, Simon?” she said, coming so close to him that the horn-top of her lantern scorched his hand.

“Maybe not. There’s two sides go to a killing, same as to a bargain. It might happen, like, that t’other lad went down.”

“But what of me, Simon, if—if it chanced otherwise?”

“I’m not meaning to let it chance otherwise, my lass. I’ve you to think of these days.” And then he drew apart, after the fashion of men when war is in the air. “Master Rupert shapes gradely,” he said. “I always said he had the makings of a soldier in him.”

“Oh, he’s a scholar,” said Martha. “I like him well enough—we all do—but he wears his head i’ the clouds, Simon.”

“Tuts! He’s never had his chance. You’re all for young Master Maurice; he’s stronger and more showy, as second bairns are apt to be; but gi’e me the young master’s settled pluck.”

“Gi’e me,” said Martha, with bewildering tenderness, “the end of all this Rising trouble, and us two in a farm together, wi’ a churn to work at, and an inglenook to sit by when the day’s work is over wi’. I’d not sell that farm I’ve dreamed of, Simon, for all your bonnie Prince’s love-locks.”

“Well, as for love-locks,” said the other, his thoughts still busier with war than peace, “he has none so many left these days. He’s a plain man, riding troubled roads; and he carries himself like a man, they say, or near thereby.”

Martha lifted her lanthorn suddenly to his face. “Aye, you carry the ‘far’ look,” she said jealously. “Cattle i’ the byre, the quiet lowing o’ them, and a hearth-place warm and ready for ye—they’re windle-straws to ye just now, my lad.”

And Simon laughed. “I’d like one straight-up fight, I own, before I settle down. It’s i’ the blood, ye see. I carried a pike i’ the last Rising, and killed one here and there, and took my wounds. A man no way forgets, Martha, the young, pleasant days. And there’s danger near the house, if all Mr. Oliphant said be true.”

“Well, gang in and meet it, then,” snapped Martha, “if your stiffened joints will let you.”

She was sore with jealousy, though Simon’s battle-hunger was her only rival, and struck at random, cruelly, as women do at these times, because God made them so. And Simon, because men are made so, winced, and recovered, and said never a word as he crossed to the kitchen door.

“Simon!” she called, with late-found penitence.He did not turn his head, but strode indoors, through the running banter that met him by the way, and went upstairs to find Rupert standing by the loophole that overlooked the main doorway.

“At your post, master?” he said dryly.

Rupert turned sharply. “You disturbed a dream of mine,” he said, in his well-bred, scholarly voice. “I was fancying men were out in the moonlit courtyard, that I aimed straight, Simon, and shot a few of those black rats from Hanover.”

Simon chuckled soberly. He liked to hear his favourite lapse from the orderly speech that was his usual habit.

“They’ll come, sure enough,” he said gruffly. “We’ve waited over-long, you and me, to miss some chance o’ frolic at the last.”

Rupert, with his large, royal air, disdaining always the lean, scholarly form he carried, laughed gently. “My faith is weak to-night, Simon. So little happens, and God knows I’ve prayed for open battle.”

“Well, bide,” said Simon. “I’ve my own fancy, too, though I was never what you might call a prayerful man, that the battle’s coming up this way. My old wounds are plaguing me, master, like to burn me up; and you may say it’s th’ change i’ the weather, if it pleases ye, but I think different.”

Rupert welcomed the other’s guarded prophecy, for to-night he needed hope. And he fell again to looking through the loophole on to the empty, moonlit courtyard; and suddenly, from the far side of the house, he heard Nance’s voice again, as she tried to sing a little of Lady Royd’s heart-sickness away.

The voice, so low and strong and charitable, the thought of her face, her brown, waving hair, her candid eyes, struck Rupert with intolerable pain and sense of loss. He recalled the years when he should have been up and doing, winning his spurs like other men. His shy, half-ironic, half-scholarly aloofness from the life of every day showed as a thing contemptible. He magnified his shortcomings, accused himself of cowardice, not physical cowardice, but moral. All these years, while his love for Nance was growing, he should have been conquering the weakness that separated him from his fellows, should have been climbing the steep path of hardship, training himself to be strong as his passion for Nance Demaine.

To-night, as he thought of these things, he understood, to the last depth, this love that possessed him utterly. It was a soldier’s love, a strong man’s. It was content to forego, content to watch and guard and work, so long as Nance was happy, though to himself it brought tumult and unrest enough. The keen, man’s longing to claim her for his own, to take her out of reach of such as Will Underwood, had given him many an evil day and night; but through it all, unconquerable, had come that strong, chivalrous desire to keep her feet from the puddles and the mire of life, to serve her hand and foot, and afterwards, since he was needful to her in no other way, to stand by and watch her happiness from some shadowed corner.

There was all his life’s training, all the tenor of his long, boyhood’s thoughts, in this fine regard he brought Squire Demaine’s daughter. There was, too, the Stuart training that had deepened the old Royd instincts given him at birth. It was, in part, the devotion he would have given a queen if he had been her cavalier; and, through it all, there went that silver skein of haplessness and abnegation bravely borne which is in the woof and weft of all things Stuart. He knew the unalterable strength and beauty of his love; and, with a sudden overmastering shame, he saw himself—himself, unfit to join the Rising, useless and a stay-at-home, beside this other picture of his high, chivalrous regard for Nance. He laughed bitterly. It was grotesque, surely, that so fine a passion should be in charge of such a weakling.

And then, from the midst of his humiliation and pain, he plucked courage and new hope. It was his way, as it had been his father’s. If this dream of his came true—if the retreat swept up this way, as Simon hoped, and gave work into his hands—he would give Nance deeds at last.

“The night is not so empty as it was, Simon,” he said, turning sharply. “We’ll patrol the house.”