Maurice to this mad rising that can only end on Tower Hill.” “That is as God wills, wife o’ mine.” Again she stamped her foot. “You’re in league together, you and he.” “We share the same Faith,” he put in dryly, “if that is to be in league together.” “Only to-day—an hour before you came—I found him mooning in the library, when he should have been out of doors. ‘Best join the priests at once, and have done with it,’ said I. And ‘No,’ he answered stubbornly, ‘I’ve been reading what the Royds did once. They fought for Charles the First, and afterwards—they died gladly, some of them. I come of a soldier-stock, and I need to fight.’ The scholar dreamed of soldiery! I tapped him on the cheek—and he a grown man of five-and-twenty—and”—she halted, some hidden instinct shaming her for the moment—“and he only answered that he knew the way of it all—by books—dear heart, by books he knew how strong men go to battle!” “Rupert said that?” asked Sir Jasper gently. “Gad! I’m proud of him. He’ll come to soldiery one day.” “By mooning in the library—by roaming the moors at all hours of the day and night—is that the way men learn to fight?” Sir Jasper was cool and debonair again. “Men learn to fight as the good God teaches them, my lady. We have no part in that. As for Rupert—I tell you the lad is staunch and leal. He was bred a Christian gentleman, after all, and[52] breed tells—it tells in the long run, Agnes, though all the fools in Lancashire go making mouths at Rupert.” [52] He strode up and down the hall, with the orderly impatience that she knew. And then he told the Rising news; and she ran towards him, and could not come too close into his arms, and made confession, girlish in its simplicity, that she, who cared little for her son, loved her husband better than her pride. “You’ll not go? It is a mad Rising—here with the Georges safe upon the throne. You need not go, at your age. Let younger men bear the brunt of it, if they’ve a mind for forlorn hopes.” He put her arms away from him, though it helped and heartened him to know that, in some queer way, she loved him. “At any age one serves the Prince, wife. I’m bidden—that is all.” Lady Royd glanced
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