“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.”