It was then Rupert learned afresh, with a vivid pain that seemed unbearable, how deep his love had gone during the past, silent years. She was in trouble, and needed him. He ran to her side, but could not outstrip the fears that crowded round him. There was the gunshot—and she was hurt; Nance, whom he had longed to keep from the least touch of harm, was hurt.
He put his arms about her. His eyes had grown used long since to the dim moonlight of the room, and they sought with feverish concern for traces of her wound.
“Where are you hurt, Nance?” he asked.
And “Here,” she said, with a wan little smile—“here, right through my heart, Rupert. I—I have killed a man, I think, just now.”
So then, through the confusion of his thoughts, he remembered that the gunshot had sounded from within doors, and his heart grew lighter. “Why, then, there’s one less of the enemy. You should be proud, my dear.”
“Proud?” Her voice was still and hushed. “You were right when you said that this was man’s work. I was watching at the north window—and the time seemed long in passing—and then I saw a man’s thick-set body coming through the snow. And I—I forgot I was a woman, and took aim, and he fell, Rupert, so suddenly, with his arms thrown up, and lay there in the snow.”
“One less,” said the master, with a return to dogged cheerfulness. “We must get to our posts again.”
Nance looked at him. Now that he knew her safe, he was again the soldier, forgetting the way of his heart and thinking only of the need for action. And her pride took fire, as she went back to her window, resolute to show him that she could be soldierly as he. For a while she dared not look out, remembering what lay yonder; and then she chided herself for cowardice, and peeped through the moonlight.
The huddled bulk of a man that had lain prone in the snow was moving now—slowly, and on hands and knees—and was creeping out of range. And once again Nance knew herself a woman; for she was glad, with a joy instant and vehement, that she had a wounded man only on her conscience.
Goldstein, when the shot hit him at close range, had thought the end had come. He was wearied out by long riding over broken roads, by need of sleep; and the flare of the gunshot, the sudden hell-fire in his left thigh, had knocked his hardiness to bits. But by and by, when he found leisure to pick his courage up, and knew that his wound went only deep through the fleshy part of his thigh, he made his way back to the stables, and roused one of his sleeping troopers; and, between them, they staunched the bleeding, and dressed the wound with odds and ends torn from the linings of their coats. And then Goldstein lay back on the straw and slept like a little child, and dreamed that he was home again in Hanover, in the days before he sought advancement in a foreign country.