“You will let him prove himself. His chance will not be long in coming, father.”

She bade him good-night gravely, yet with a shy, impulsive tenderness, and went up to her own room. The moon was staring in through the low, broad window-space. A keen frost was setting fingers on the glass already; she brushed away the delicate tracery and stood watching the silent, empty lands without. No sleet was falling now. She could see each line of wall that climbed, dead-black by contrast, up the white slope of the pastures. Beyond and high above, a steel-blue sky marked, ridge by ridge, the rough, uncompromising outline of the moor.

It was a scene desolate beyond belief, and would have chilled one foreign to the country; but Nance looked up the wintry slopes as if she found a haven there. There was no illusion attaching to this riding-out of the war-men from Lancashire. She was not swayed by any casual glamour of the pipes, any kilted pageantry of warfare. Her father had taught her, patiently enough, that the Stuarts, though they chanced to capture the liking of most decent women, were intent on graver business. Not once, in the years that had gone before this call to arms, had he trained her to an ideal lower than his own. The Stuart, to his belief, stood for charity, for sacrifice, for unbending loyalty to the Faith once delivered. And such outlook, as he had told her plainly, made neither for pageantry nor sloth.

Nance, watching the sleety wilderness outside, hearing the yelp of the wind as it sprang from the bitter, eastern bank of cloud, recalled her father’s teaching with a new, sudden understanding. This sleety land, with its black field-walls climbing to the windy moor above, was eloquent in its appeal to her. There was storm and disaster now—but there was[23] heather-time to come, and bees among the ling, and the clear, high sunshine over all. Old Squire Demaine, with all his rough-and-ready faults, had taught her faith.

[23]

She forgot her trouble touching Will Underwood. The rough, moonlit moor reminded her, in some odd way, of Rupert—of the scholar who a little while ago, up yonder, had taken some fancied quarrel of her own upon his slim shoulders. Somewhere, hidden by the easy pity of the years, was a faith in this scholar who caused misgiving to his friends. She remembered that her father—the last man in Lancashire to be tolerant of a fool—would listen to no gibes at Rupert’s expense, that he had bidden her, soon as the hunt was up in earnest, seek refuge at Windyhough.

These white, rough uplands did not 

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