“Rupert, how can you smile?” asked Lady Royd, distraught and fretful.
“Because needs must, mother,” he answered gently. “And now, by your leave, you will take Nance upstairs. There’s work to be done down here.”
Nance touched his arm in passing. He did not know it. Body, and soul, and mind, he was bent on this work of holding Windyhough for his father and the Prince. He had lived with loneliness and patience and denial of all enterprise; and now there was a virile havoc about the house.
“Now for the good siege, Simon,” he said, listening to the uproar out of doors.
CHAPTER XV
THE BRUNT OF IT
The master turned from the doorway to find the women-servants and old Nat, the shepherd, crowded at the far end of the hall. They were agape with mingled fear and curiosity, and they were chattering like magpies.
“We’ll be murdered outright,” said the kitchen-maid, her pertness gone.
“Aye,” wept the housekeeper, “and me that has prayed, day in and day out for fifty years, that I’d die easy and snuglike i’ my bed. There’s something not modest in dying out o’ bed, I always did say.”