Rupert winced. His thoughts of Nance Demaine were so long, so fragrant. Since his boyhood struggled first into the riper understanding, he had cloistered her image from the world’s rough usage. She had been to him something magical, unattainable, and he was paying now for an homage less healthy than this world’s needs demand. It was all so trifling, this happy-go-lucky wager of a dog against a glove; but he saw in it a supplanting more bitter than any that had gone before.

He stood there for a moment, irresolute, bound by old subservience to Maurice, by remembrance of his weakness and his nickname of “the scholar.” Then the moor whispered in his ear, told him to be a fool no longer; and a strength that was almost gaiety came to him.

“Get out of the saddle, Maurice,” he said peremptorily. “I want to talk to you on foot.”

[7]Maurice obeyed by instinct, as if a ghost had met him in the open and startled him. Here was the scholar—the brother whom he could not any way despise, because he loved him—with a red spot of colour in each cheek, and in his voice the ring of true metal.

[7]

“Well?” asked the younger.

“You never would have claimed that glove.”

The boy’s temper, easy-going as it was, was roused. “Would you have hindered me?”

“Yes. I—I love her. That is all.”

So young Maurice laughed aloud, and Rupert ran in suddenly and hit him on the mouth, and the fight began. In his dreams the heir of Windyhough had revelled in battles, in swift assaults, forlorn and desperate hopes; for he had known no waking pleasures of the kind. And always, in his dreams, there had been a certain spaciousness and leisure; he had found time, in between giving and receiving blows, to feel himself the big man of his hands, to revel in the sheer bravery of the thing.

In practice, here on the open moor, with snow coming up across the stormy, steel-grey sky, there was no leisure and no illusion. He had no time to feel, no luxury of sentiment. He knew only that, in some muddled way, he was fighting Nance’s battle; that, by some miracle, he got a sharp blow home at times; that twice Maurice knocked him down; that, by some native stubbornness, he got up again, with the moor dancing in wide circles round him, and hit his man.

It was swift and soon over, as Rupert thought of 

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