The Skye boatmen took their Prince safely to the mainland, and were not ashamed because they wept at parting from him. And then the Stuart and Sir Jasper’s heir set out again along the lone tracks that taught them understanding of each other—understanding of the world that does not show its face among the crowded haunts where men lie and slander and drive hard bargains one against the other. Their bodies were hard, for wind and weather had toughened them till they were lean and rugged as upland trees that have grown strong with storm. Their courage was steady, because all except life was lost. And at their hearts there was a quick, insistent music, as if the pipes were playing. They were fighting against long odds, and they were northern born; and the world, in some queer way, went not amiss with them.

Rupert, in between the journeys and the vigils shared with the Prince, was often abroad on the errands that had grown dear to him since coming into Scotland. He would ride here, ride there, with night and danger for companions, gathering news of the enemies, the friends, who could be counted on. And he found constantly the stirring knowledge that, though he had not been keen to ride to hounds in Lancashire, he was hot to take his fences now.

On one of these days he rode in, tired and spent, bringing news from the braes of Glenmoriston, and found the Stuart smoking his pipe, while he skinned a deer that he had shot.

“You are killing yourself for loyalty,” said the Prince, glancing at him with a sudden, friendly smile.

“By your leave, sir,” said Rupert, as if he talked of Murray’s plain arithmetic, “I am alive at last.”“You’re made of the martyr’s stuff,” said the other.

“Your Highness, they called me the scholar there in Lancashire, and I knew what that meant. I am trying to outride the shame.”

Rupert was tired out. The Prince was tired at heart, because of Culloden, because of Miss MacDonald, whom he was not to see again, and all the dreams that had tumbled from the high skies to sordid earth. Neither of them had tasted food for six-and-thirty hours. And at these times men are apt to find a still, surprising companionship, such as the tramps know who foot it penniless along the roads.

“We have found our kingdom, you and I,” said the Prince, with sudden intuition—“here on the upland tracks, where a man learns something of the God who made him.”

Rupert looked out across the mountains, blue-purple in the gloaming, and caught the other’s mood, and spoke as a friend does to a friend, when the heart needs a confidant. “It is all a riddle,” he said slowly. “I thought all lost, after Culloden—and yet I’ve tasted happiness, tasted it for the first time in my life. To carry your life on the saddle with me, to keep open eyes when I’m sick for sleep, to know that the Stuart trusts me—I tell you, I have tasted glory.”

The Prince turned his head aside. This was the loyalty known to him since he first set foot in Scotland, the service he claimed, he knew not why, from gentle and simple of his well-wishers. And he was remembering how many of these eager folk had died on his behalf, was forgetting that he, too, had gone sleepless through peril and disaster because he carried at his saddle-bow, not one life only, but a kingdom’s fate.

“Your news from Glenmoriston, sir?” he asked sharply.

“Pleasant news. A man has died for you, with gallantry.”

“You call it pleasant news?”

“Listen, your Highness! It was one Roderick MacKenzie—he was a merchant in Edinburgh, and left the town to follow you; and he found his way, after Culloden, to the hills about Glenmoriston. He was alone, and a company of the enemy surprised him; and he faced them, and killed two before they overcame him; and he died in anguish, but found strength to lift himself just before the end. He knew that he was like you, in height and face, and cried, ‘God forgive you, you have killed your Prince!’”

“It was brave; it was well meant. But, sir, it is not pleasant news.”

“He bought your safety. They are carrying his head to London to claim the ransom. And the troops have left the hills, your Highness—they believe you dead.”

“I wish their faith were justified,” said the other, with the bitterness that always tortured him when he heard that men had died on his behalf. “Your pardon,” he added by and by. “I should thank you for the news—and yet I cannot.”

The next day they climbed the brae and went down the long, heathery slope that took them to Glenmoriston; and nowhere was there ambush or pursuit, as Rupert had foretold—only crying of the birds on hilly pastures, and warmth of the July sun as it ripened the ling to full bloom, and humming of the bees among the early bell-heather.

They came to the glen at last, and ahead of them, a half-mile away, there was blue smoke rising from the chimney of a low, ill-thatched farmstead. And the Prince touched Rupert’s arm as they moved forward.

“Lord, how hunger drums at a man’s ribs!” he said, with a tired laugh. “If there were all the Duke’s army lying in wait for us yonder, we should still go on, I think. There may be collops there, and eggs—all the good cheer that Mrs. MacDonald thought scanty when we came to the laird’s house at Kingsborough.”

“By your leave,” said Rupert gravely, “it does not bear speaking of. I begin to understand how Esau felt when he sold his birthright for a mess of pottage.”

They reached the house, and they found there six outlaws of the hills, ready with the welcome Rupert had made secure before he led the Prince here. They had entrenched themselves in this wild glen, had ridden abroad, robbing with discretion, but never hurting a man who was too poor to pay tribute. Their name was a byword for cattle-lifting, and they lived for plunder. Yet, somehow, when the Stuart came among them, with thirty thousand pounds easy in the gaining, they disdained blood-money.

For all that, another hope of the Prince’s crumbled and went by him, after he had greeted his new hosts. There were neither eggs nor collops in the house—only a dish of oatmeal, without milk to ease its roughness. The Glenmoriston men explained that Cumberland’s soldiery had been about the glen, had raided their cattle and sheep, had laid bare the countryside.

“For all that,” said the Prince, unconquerable in disaster, “I thank you for your oatmeal. As God sees me, you have stilled a little of the ache I had.”

And the Glenmoriston men liked the way of him. And when, next day, he and Rupert went up the hills and stalked a deer, and brought it home for the cooking, their loyalty was doubled.

Through the days that followed the outlaws found leisure to prove the guests they harboured. In the hill countries a man’s reputation stands, not on station or fair words, but on the knowledgable, quiet outlook his neighbours bring to bear on him. And ever a little more the outlaws liked these two, who were lean and hard and weather-bitten as themselves.

The Prince would not claim shelter in the house, because long use had taught him to prefer a bed among the heather. And Rupert, lying near by o’ nights, learned more of the Stuart than all these last disastrous days had taught him. When a man sleeps in the open, forgetting there may be a listener, he is apt to lose his hold on the need for reticence that house-walls bring.

The Prince, half between sleep and waking, would lift himself on an elbow, would murmur that men had died for him—men better than himself, who had followed him for loyalty and not for hire, men whom he should have shepherded to better purpose. And then he would snatch an hour or two of sleep, and would wake again with a question, sharp and hurried and unquiet.

“Where’s Miss MacDonald? She’s in danger. The seas are riding high—they’re riding high, I say!—and there’s only my poor plaid to cover her.”

And so it was always when the Prince rambled in his sleep. There was never a complaint on his own behalf, never a wild lament that he was skulking, a broken man, among the mountains after coming near to London and high victory. He had two griefs only, in the night hours that probe to the heart of a man—passionate regret for the slain, passionate regard for Miss MacDonald’s safety.

And once the Prince, though he lay in a dead sleep, began to speak of Miss MacDonald with such praise, such settled and devout regard, that Rupert got up from the heather and went out into the still summer night, lest he pried too curiously into sacred things. And as he went up and down the glen, scenting the subtle odours that steal out at night-time, his thoughts ran back to Lancashire. It seemed long since he had roamed the moors in bygone summers, with just these keen, warm scents about him, counting himself the scholar, aching for Nance Demaine, dreaming high, foolish dreams of a day that should come which would prove him fit to wear her favour.

And he was here, leaner and harder than of old, with a deed or two to his credit. And he had learned a week ago, while riding on the Prince’s business, that Lady Royd and Nance had come to Edinburgh, intent on sharing the work of brave women there who were aiding fugitives, by means fair or crafty, to reach the shores of France. He knew that his father and Maurice were safely overseas; and a sudden hope flashed across the hard, unremitting purpose that had kept his knees close about the saddle these last days. When the Prince was secure, when these hazards were over—the hazards that had grown strangely pleasant—there might be leisure to return to earlier dreams, to wake and find them all come true.

For an hour Rupert paced the glen, with gentler thoughts for company than he had known since he first killed a man at the siege of Windyhough. Then, with a shrug of the shoulders, he remembered to-morrow and its needs, and went back and settled himself to sleep; but he did not lie so near to the Prince as before, lest he overhear him talk again of Miss MacDonald.

The next day news came that the soldiery were out among the hills again. The gallant head of Roderick MacKenzie, who had earned a long respite for his Prince, had been taken to London, and men who knew the Stuart had sworn that it bore little likeness to him; and news had been sped north, by riders killing a horse at every journey’s end, that the Prince was still at large among the Highlands.

The Glenmoriston men were unmoved by this new trouble. They explained, with careless humour, that their glen was already so stripped of food as to be scarce worth living in; and they went out with their guests into the unknown perils waiting for them as if they went to revelry. And the Prince learned afresh that a man, when his back is to the wall, had best not seek friends among the sleek and prosperous, who have cherished toys to love, but among the outlaws and the driven folk who know the open road of life.

It was by aid of the Glenmoriston men, their knowledge of the passes, that the fugitives came safe to Lochiel’s country of Lochaber, that, after dangers so close-set as to be almost laughable—so long the odds against them were—they reached the shore of Loch Moidart and found a French privateer beating about the coast. Those on board the ship were keeping an anxious look-out toward both land and sea; they had been advised that the Prince, with luck, might reach Moidart about noon, and they knew, from sharp experience during their voyage to the bay, that the enemy’s gunboats were thick as flies about the Western Isles.It was an odd company that gathered on the strand while the ship beat inshore with the half of a light, uncertain wind. The Prince was there, Lochiel and Rupert, and a small band of loyal gentry who had been in hiding round about their homes. Yet a beggar in his rags and tatters might have joined them and claimed free passage to the French coast, so far as outward seeming went. Their clothes were made up of odds and ends, begged or borrowed during the long retreat. All were itching from the attacks of the big, lusty fleas that abound along the loyal isles. The one sign that proved them the Stuart’s gentlemen was a certain temperate ease of carriage, a large disdain of circumstance, a security, gay and dominant, in the faith that preferred beggarman’s rags to fine raiment bought by treachery. They did not fear, did not regret, though they were leaving all that meant home and the cosy hearth.

The Prince, while the French ships were beating inshore, took Lochiel aside. Through the wild campaign they had been like twin brothers, these two, showing the same keen faith, the like courage under hardship.

“Lochiel, you know the country better than I. You’re bred to your good land, while I was only born to it. You will tell me where the Isle of Skye lies from here.”

“Yonder,” said the other, pointing across the grey-blue haze of summer seas.

And the Prince stood silent, thinking of the victory there in Skye—the victory that had left him wearier than Culloden’s sick defeat had done. And Lochiel, who had had his own affairs to attend to lately, and had been aloof from gossip, wondered as he saw the trouble in the other’s face.

The Prince turned at last. “Lochiel,” he said, with a tired smile, “how does the Usurper’s proclamation run? Thirty thousand pounds on my head—dead or alive! Well, alive or dead, I wish this tattered body of mine were still in Skye—in Skye, Lochiel, where I left the soul of me.”

“You are sad, your Highness——”“Sad? Nay, I’ve waded deeper than mere sadness, like the Skye mists out yonder. Well, we stand where we stand, friend,” he added, with sharp return from dreams, “and the ship is bringing to.”

There was still a little while before the boats were lowered from the shore, and the Prince, pacing up and down the strand, encountered Rupert. “A fine ending!” he said, with temperate bitterness. “I landed in Lochaber from France with seven gentlemen. I go back with a few more. This is the fruit of your toil, Mr. Royd—and of mine.”

And, “No, by your leave,” said Rupert. “Your Highness has lit a fire that will never die—a fire of sheer devotion——”

“Ah! the courtier speaks.”

Rupert’s voice broke, harshly and without any warning. He saw his Prince in evil case, when he should have been a conqueror. He remembered the night rides, the faith, that had had the crowning of the Stuart as their goal. “A broken heart speaks—a heart broken in your service, sir,” he said.

The man’s strength, his candid, deep simplicity, struck home to the Prince, bringing a foolish mist about his eyes. “Your love goes deep as that?” he said.

“It goes deeper than my love of life, your Highness.”

So then, after a silence, the other laid a strong kindly hand on his shoulder. “You’ll go far and well for me, sir—but put away that superstition of the broken heart. Believe me, for I know”—he glanced across the misty stretch of sea that divided him from Skye—“there are broken hopes, and broken dreams, and disaster sobbing at one’s ears, but a man—a man, sir, does not permit his heart to break. You and I—I think we have our pride.”

When the boats grounded on the beach, the Prince waited till his gentlemen got first aboard, and at last there were only himself and Rupert left standing on the shore.

“You will precede me, Mr. Royd. It is my privilege just now to follow, not to lead,” said the Prince.

“Your Highness, I stay, by your leave.”The mist had been creeping down from the tops for the past hour, and now the light, outer fringe of it had reached the water-line. The waiting boat lay in a haze of mystery; the privateer beyond showed big and wraithlike, though a shrouded sunlight still played on the crests of mimic waves. And the Stuart and Rupert stood regarding each other gravely at this last meeting for many weeks to come.

“You stay?” echoed the Prince. “Sir, you have done so much for me—and I looked to have your company during the crossing; and, indeed, you must be ill of your exertions to decline safety now.”

Rupert glanced at the ship, then at the Stuart’s face. There was temptation in the longing, to be near his Prince until France was reached, but none in the thought of personal safety. “I lay awake last night,” he said slowly, “and it grew clear, somehow, that I was needed here in Scotland. There’s the country round Edinburgh, your Highness—packed thick with loyal men who are waiting their chance to find a ship across to France—and I hold so many threads that Oliphant of Muirhouse would have handled better, if he had lived.”

“Why, then,” said the Prince, yielding to impulse after these months of abnegation, “we’ll let our friends set sail without us. These gentry did me service. You shall teach me to return it.”

“Your Highness, it would ruin all! I can ride where you cannot, because I’m of slight account——”

“So you, too, have your mathematics, like the rest,” put in the other wearily—“and all your sums add up to the one total—that I must be denied the open hazard. I tell you, Mr. Royd, it is no luxury to take ship across to France and leave my friends in danger.”

The mist was thickening, and Lochiel, growing anxious on account of the delay, leaped ashore and came to where the two were standing. And the Prince, returning to the prose of things, knew that he must follow the road of tired retreat mapped out for him since Derby.“Lochiel,” he said grimly, “I was planning an escape—from safety. And your eyes accuse me, because my heart is with this gentleman who chooses to stay in Scotland.”

And then he told what Rupert had in mind; and Lochiel, for all the urgency, halted a moment to appraise this lean, tranquil man who met the call of destiny as if it were an invitation to some pleasant supper-party.

“It was so Oliphant carried himself, Mr. Royd,” he said gravely. “God knows I wish you well.”

They parted. And Rupert watched their boat reach the privateer, watched the ship’s bulk glide huge and ghostly into the mists. He was hard and zealous, had chosen his road deliberately; but he was human, too, and a sense of utter loneliness crept over him. The Cause was lost. Many of his friends would not tread French or Scottish ground again, because the soil lay over them. He had not tasted food that day, and the mist seemed to be soaking into the bones of him. And loyalty, that had brought him to this pass, showed like a dim, receding star which mocked him as a will-o’-the-wisp might do.

For all that, he was born and bred a Royd, and the discipline of many months was on his side. And, little by little, he regained that steadiness of soul—not to be counterfeited or replaced by any other joy—which comes to the man whose back is to the wall, with a mob of dangers assaulting him in front.

The Glenmoriston men had been offered their chance of a passage to France with the Prince, but had declined it, preferring their own country and the dangerous life that had grown second nature to them. And Rupert, knowing the glen to which they had ridden after speeding the Stuart forward, waited till the mists had lifted a little and found his way to them.

They crossed themselves when he appeared among them as they sat on the slope of the brae, cooking the midday meal; but when he proved himself no ghost and explained the reason of his coming, and his need to be set on the way to Edinburgh, they warmed afresh to his view of that difficult business named life. He shared their meal, and afterwards one of their number, Hector, by name, led him out along the first stage of his journey south.

The mists had cleared by this time, leaving the braesides russet where the sun swept the autumn brackens, but the mood they bring to Highlandmen was strong on Rupert’s guide. Hector could find no joy in life, no talk to ease the going. Instead, he fell into a low, mournful chant; and the words of it were not calculated to raise drooping spirits:

A little chill crossed Rupert’s courage, as if a touch of east wind had come from the heart of the warm skies. He had seen many dreary dreams of late; had fared beyond the Isle o’ Skye; what if Hector were “seeing far,” and this dirge were an omen of the coming days? And then he laughed, because in the dangerous tracks men make their own omens or disdain them altogether.

“You’re near the truth, Hector,” he broke in; “but it’s only a half-dead man. There’s life yet in him.”

And Hector glowered at him; for the Highland folk, when they are hugging sadness close, cherish it as a mother does her first-born babe. For all that, he brought Rupert safely, after three days’ marching, to the next post of his journey, and passed him on to certain outlaws whose country lay farther south; and by this sort of help, after good and evil weather and some mischances by the way, Rupert came at last to Edinburgh and reached the house where he knew that Lady Royd and Nance were lodging.

The house lay very near to Holyrood; and as he went down the street Rupert halted for a while, forgetful of his errand. The tenderest moon that ever lit a troubled world looked down on this palace of departed glories. The grey pile was mellowed, transfigured by some light o’ dreams. It was as if the night knew all about the Stuarts who would haunt Holyrood so long as its walls stood; knew their haplessness, their charm, their steadfast hold on the fine, unthrifty faith they held; knew the answer that some of them, who had gone before, had found in the hereafter that does not weigh with the shopkeepers’ scales.

There is a soul in such walls as Holyrood’s, and Rupert stood as if he held communion with a friend whose sympathies ran step by step with his. Here Mary Stuart had stood alone, a queen in name, facing the barbarous, lewd nobles who were, by title of mere courtesy, her gentlemen. Here she had seen Rizzio hurried down the twisting stair, had supped with her fool-husband, Darnley. From here she had gone out, the queen of hearts and tragedy, to that long exile which was to end at Fotheringay.

Here, too, the Prince had kept high state, a year ago, and all Edinburgh had flocked to dance a Stuart measure. He came fresh from his first battle, crowned with victory and charm of person; and the clans were rising fast; and hope shone bright toward London and the crown.

Rupert looked at the grey pile and felt all this, as one listens to the silence of a friend who does not need to speak. And then a drift of cloud came across the moon, and Holyrood lay wan and grey. It was as if a sudden gust had quenched all the candles that had lit the ballroom here when the yellow-haired laddie came dancing south.

And still the fugitive tarried. He had been used so long to night roads and the constant peril that this dim light, and the wind piping at his ear, pleased him more than any blaze of candles and lilt of dance-music. Deep knowledge came to him, bred of the hazards that had made him hard and lean. He sorrowed no more for Derby and Culloden; his present thirst and hunger went by him, as things of slight account; for he remembered the long months of hiding, the intimacy he had been privileged to share with Prince Charles Edward. There had been no glamour of the dance, no pomp, about these journeyings through the Highlands; there had been no swift, eager challenge and applause from ladies’ eyes; and yet Rupert had tested, as few had done, the fine edge and temper of the Stuart charm.

Here, under the shadow of grey Holyrood, he loitered to recall their wayfaring together. There had been winter journeyings through incessant rain, or snow, or winds that raved down mountain passes; there had been summer travels through the heather, with the sun beating pitilessly on them, over the stark length of moors that had none but brackish water and no shade. They had slept o’ nights with danger for a pillow and the raw wind for coverlet. And through it all the Prince had shown a brave, unanswerable front to the sickness of defeat, the hiding when he longed for action. If food and drink were scarce, he sang old clan songs or recalled light jests and stories that had once roused the French Court to laughter. If danger pressed so closely from all four quarters of the hill that escape seemed hopeless, his cheeriness infected those about him with a courage finer than their own.

Looking back on these days, Rupert knew that no ball at Holyrood here, no triumph-march to London, could have proved the Stuart as those Highland journeyings had done. The Prince and he had learned the way of gain in loss, and with it the gaiety that amazes weaker men.

From Holyrood—the moon free of clouds and the grey walls finding faith again—a friendly message came to him. He caught the Stuart glamour up—the true, abiding glamour that does not yield to this world’s limitations. What he had read in the library at Windyhough was now a triumph-song that he had found voice to sing.

He came to the house where Lady Royd was lodging, and knocked at the door; and presently a trim Scots lassie opened to him, and saw him standing there in the moonlight of the street, his face haggard, his clothes, made up of borrowed odds and ends, suggesting disrepute. She tried to close the door in his face; but Rupert had anticipated this, and pushed his way inside.

“Is Miss Demaine in the house?” he asked.

The maid recovered a little of her courage and her native tartness. “She is, forbye. Have you come buying old claes, or are you looking just for a chance to steal siller from the hoose?”

Rupert caught at the help she gave him. “There’s the quick wit ye have, my lass,” he said.

“Ah, now, you’ll not be ‘my lassing’ me! I’ll bid ye keep your station, as I keep mine.”

“Well, then, my dear, go up to your mistress—the young mistress, I mean—and tell her there’s a pedlar wanting her—a pedlar from the hills of Lancashire. Tell her he comes buying and selling white favours.”

“So you’re just one of us,” said the maid, with surprising change of front. Then, her Scots caution getting the better of her again, “Your voice is o’ the gentry-folk,” she added, “but you’re a queer body i’ your claes. How should I know what you’d be stealing while I ran up to tell the mistress?”

Rupert, for answer, closed and barred the door behind him, and pointed up the stair. And then the maid, by the masterful, quiet way of him, knew that he came peddling honesty.

And by and by Nance came down, guessing who had come, because twice during the past month Rupert had sent word to her by messengers encountered haphazard in the Highland country.

At the stairfoot she halted, and never saw what clothes he wore. She looked only at his hard, tired face, at the straight carriage of him, as if he stood on parade. And, without her knowing it, or caring either way, a welcome, frank and luminous, brought a sudden beauty to the face that had been magical enough to him in the far-off Lancashire days.

The warmth of the lighted hall, the sense of courage and well-being that Nance had always brought him, were in sharp contrast with the night and the ceaseless peril out of doors. He went to her, and took her two hands, and would not be done with reading what her eyes had to tell him. There could be no doubting what had come to them—the love deep, and to the death, and loyal; the love, not to be bought or counterfeited, that touches common things with radiance.

Rupert was giddy with it all. He had only to stoop and claim her, without question asked or answered. And yet he would not. He fought against this sudden warmth that tempted him to forget his friends—those driven comrades who trusted him to see them safely on board ship to the French coast. He put Nance away, as a courtier might who fears to hurt his queen, and only the strength of him redeemed his ludicrous and muddied clothes.

“You are not proved yet?” said Nance, with a gentle laugh of raillery and comradeship. “And yet the men who come in from the Highlands—the men we have helped to safety, Lady Royd and I—bring another tale of you.”

Good women and bad are keen to play the temptress when they see a man hard set by the peril of his own wind-driven, eager heart; for Eve dies hard in any woman.

“There are others,” he said stubbornly—“loyal men who trust me to bring them into Edinburgh.”

“Scruples?” She mocked him daintily. “Women are not won by scruples.”

He looked at her with the disarming, boyish smile that she remembered from old days—the smile which hid a purpose hard as steel. “Then women must be lost, Nance,” he answered suavely.

Nance looked at him. He had changed since the days when her least whim had swayed him more than did the giving of her whole heart now. He was steady and unyielding, like a rock against which the winds beat idly. And suddenly a loneliness came over her, a wild impatience of men’s outlook. She recalled the day at Windyhough, just after Sir Jasper had ridden out, when Lady Royd had complained that honour was more to a man than wife-love and his home’s need of him. She remembered how, with a girl’s untutored zeal, she had blamed Sir Jasper’s wife because she could not realise the high romance of it. But now she understood.

“You rode out to prove yourself—for my sake and the Cause?” she said, with cool disdain.

“Yes, Nance.”

“And you found—adventure. And your name is one to kindle hero-worship wherever loyal fugitives meet and speak of you. Oh, you shall have your due, Rupert! But in the doing of it the hard endeavour grew dear in itself—dearer than life, than—than little Nance Demaine, for whose sake you got to horse.”

He flushed, knowing she spoke truth; and he stood at bay, ashamed of what should have been his pride. And then he returned, by habit, to the mood taught him by night-riding and the over-arching skies.

“Men love that way,” he said bluntly.

Nance was twisting and untwisting the kerchief she held between her capable, strong fingers. She had not guessed till now the bitterness of tongue she could command.

“Oh, yes, my dear; we learned it together, did we not, in the library at Windyhough? There was a book of Richard Lovelace, his poems, and he was very graceful when he bade his wife farewell:

And honour took him to the open—to the rousing hunt—and his wife stayed on at home.”

Rupert, unskilled in the lore that has tempted many fools afield, was dismayed by the attack. In his simplicity, he had looked for praise when he put temptation by him and asked only for a God-speed till the road of his plain duty was ended and he was free to claim her. He did not know—how should he?—that women love best the gifts that never reach their feet.

“Nance,” he said, “what ails you women? It was so at Windyhough, when the Loyal Meet rode out, and mother cried as if they’d found dishonour.”

“What ails us?” She was not bitter now, but helpless, and her eyes were thick with tears. “Our birthright ails us. We’re like children crying in the dark, and the night’s lonely round us, and we are far from home. And the strong hand comes to us, and we cast it off, because we need its strength. And then we go crying in the dark again, and wonder why God made us so. And—and that is what ails us,” she added, with a flash of sharp, defiant humour. And her eyes clouded suddenly. “I—I have lost a father to the Cause. It is hard to be brave these days, Rupert.”

So then he looked neither before nor after, but took the straight way and the ready with her. And by and by the yapping of a pampered dog broke the silence of the house, and Lady Royd’s voice sounded, low and querulous, from the stairhead.

“Nance, where are you? Poor Fido is not well—not well at all.”

For the moment Rupert believed that he was home at Windyhough again. Fido’s bark, the need paramount that his wants must be served at once, were like old days.

“They have not told her you are here,” said Nance. “I’ll run up and break the news.”

When Rupert came into the parlour up above, Fido, true to old habit, ran yapping round him, and bit his riding-boots; for he hated men, because they knew him for a lap-dog. And, after the din had died down a little, Rupert stepped to his mother’s side, and stooped to kiss her hand. And she looked him up and down; and the motherhood in her was keen and proved, but she could forego old habits as little as could Fido.

“Dear heart, what clothes to wear in Edinburgh!” she cried. “It’s as well you’re not known in the town for a Royd.”

“Yes, it’s as well, mother,” he answered dryly.

“You are thinner than you were, Rupert, and straighter in the shoulders, and—and many things have happened to you.”

“I rode out for happenings.”

“Oh, yes, you’re so like your father; and they tell me what you’ve done——”

“And you, mother?” he broke in. “There are gentlemen of the Prince’s who would not be safe in France to-day without your help—yours and Nance’s.”

“There, my dear, you fatigue me! I have done so little. It grew dull in Lancashire, waiting for news of your father. It was all so simple—Fido, my sweet, you will not bark at Rupert; he’s a friend—and then I had my own fortune, you see, apart from Windyhough, and one must spend money somehow, must one not? So I began playing at ships—just like a child gone back to the nursery—and Nance here was as big a baby as myself.”

If Rupert had changed, so had Lady Royd. There was no faded prettiness now about her face, but there were lines of beauty. Behind her light handling of these past weeks in Edinburgh there was a record of sleepless nights, of harassed days, of discomfort and peril undertaken willingly. She had spent money in providing means of passage for the exiles; but she had spent herself, too, in ceaseless stratagem and watchfulness.

“It was all so piquant,” she went on, in the old, indolent tone. “So many gallant men supped here, Rupert, before taking boat. And they brought each his tale of battle in the hills. And their disguises were so odd, almost as odd as the clothes you’re wearing now, my dear.”

“The Prince’s were little better when I last saw him,” laughed the other.

“Ah, now, you will sit down beside me—here—and Nance shall sit there, like Desdemona listening to Othello. And you will tell us of the Prince. You were very near his person during the Highland flight, they tell me.”

So Rupert, because he had that one night’s leisure at command, forgot his own perils in telling of the Stuart’s. He had no art of narrative, except the soldier’s plain telling of what chanced; but, step by step, he led them through the broken days, talking seldom of himself, but constantly of Prince Charles Edward, until the bare record of their wanderings became a lively and abiding tribute to the Stuart’s strength. And when he had done Lady Royd was crying softly, while Nance felt a strange loyalty play round her like a windy night about the moors of Lancashire.

“He was like that!” said Lady Royd at last. “He was like that, while, God forgive me! I was picturing him all the while in love-locks, dancing a minuet.”

“The sword-dance is better known, mother, where we have been,” said Rupert, with pleasant irony.

Late that night, when Nance had left them together for a while, Lady Royd came and laid a hand on her son’s arm. “You have done enough,” she said. “Oh, I know! There are still many broken men, waiting for a passage. They must take their chance, Rupert. Your father was not ashamed to cross to France, with my help.”

He put an arm about her, for he had learned tenderness in a hard school. “Mother, he was not ashamed, because his work was done here. Mine is not. What Oliphant knew of the byways—what the last months have taught me—I cannot take the knowledge with me, to rust in France. I am pledged to these gentry of the Prince’s.”

“Then I shall go on playing at ships here—till you come to ask a passage.”

And her face was resolute and proud, as if this son of hers had returned a conqueror.

The next day, after nightfall, Rupert went out again, through Edinburgh’s moonlit streets, toward the northern hills and the perils that he coveted. And just before he went Nance Demaine came down into the hall, and stood beside him in the gusty candlelight. Old days and new were tangled in her mind; she was aware only of a great heart-sickness and trouble, so that she did not halt to ask herself if it were maidenly or prudent to come down for another long good-bye. In some muddled way she remembered Will Underwood, his debonair and easy claiming of her kerchief, remembered their meeting on the heath, and afterwards Will lying in the courtyard at Windyhough, his body tortured by a gaping wound. She had given him her kerchief then for pity, and now Rupert was going out without claiming the token she would have given him for love. Rupert seemed oddly forgetful of little things these days, she told herself.

“Would you not wear my favour—for luck?” she asked.

And then, giving no time for answer, she began feverishly to knot her kerchief into a white cockade; and then again she thought better of it, and untied the blue scarf that was her girdle, and snipped a piece from it with the scissors hanging at her waist.

“It is the dear Madonna’s colour; and I think you ride for faith,” she said, with a child’s simplicity. “Rupert, I do not know how or why, but I let you go very willingly. I did not understand until to-night how—how big a man’s love for a woman is.”

They were not easy days that followed. Rupert was among the Midlothian hills—farther afield sometimes—snatching sleep and food when he could, shepherding the broken gentry, leaving nothing undone that a man’s strength and single purpose could accomplish. And in the house near Holyrood Lady Royd and Nance were helping the fugitives he sped forward to get on shipboard. And ever, as they plied this trade of separation under peril, a knowledge and a trust went up and down between Edinburgh and the northern hills—a trust that did not go on horseback or on foot, because its wings were stretched for flight above ground.

And near the year’s end, with an easterly haar that made the town desolate, the last fugitive came to the house that lay near Holyrood. He should have been spent with well-doing, foot-sore and saddle-sore with journeyings among the hills; but, instead he carried himself as if he had found abundant health.

“I’ve done my work, mother,” he said, stooping to Lady Royd’s hand.

“It’s as well, my dear. Nance and I were nearly tired of playing at ships.”

That night they got aboard at Leith; and, after a contrary and troubled crossing, they came into harbour on the French coast. The night was soft and pleasant, like the promises that France had made the Stuart—the promises made and broken a score of times before ever the Prince landed in the Western Isles. A full moon was making a track of amethyst and gold across the gentle seas, and a faint, salt breeze was blowing.

“Are you content?” asked Nance.

“Content? My dear, what else?”

And yet she saw his glance rove out across the moonlit track that led to England; and a jealous trouble, light as the sea-breeze, crossed her happiness; and she conquered it, because she had learned in Edinburgh the way of a man’s heart.

“You’re dreaming of the next Rising?” she said, with a low, tranquil laugh. “I shall forgive you—so long as you let me share your dreams.”

FINIS