“My dear,” he said, with the tenderest simplicity, “you’d best get to bed. You have done enough for one night.”
She did not turn her head, and her voice was cold. “Have you done enough, Rupert?”
“Oh, I’m used to lack of sleep, and you are not.”
She thought of the wakeful nights that had been torture to her since Will Underwood returned. First love, built of the stuff she had given him, dies hard; for it is the weak things that find easy death-beds, because their grip on this life and hereafter is languid and of slight account.
“I can handle a musket,” she said, turning with sharp defiance; “and our defence is—is not strong.”
In the silence, across the dull moonlight of the corridor, they measured each other with a long glance. And Nance, in this mood of hers, was passionately at war with him. Until to-day he had been her bond-slave, gay when she willed it, foolish and out of heart when she flouted him. And now her reign was ended. Rupert did not know it yet; but Nance, with the intuition that seems to do women little service, was aware that she had lost for the time being a cavalier and found instead a master.
“You can handle a musket,” he said dryly. “Good-night, Nance—and remember to keep your head low above the sill. The men outside can aim straight, too.”
He went back to his post at the window overlooking the main door. And he began to think of Nance, of the brown, shapely head that had been magic to him—the head that was in danger of a bullet from one of Goldstein’s men. Yesterday he would have gone to her side, to ease the fierce pain for her safety; his feet were willing, and he wondered that instead he stood obstinately at his post, intent on musketry and the welfare of his house.
Nance waited for his return. She had had him at call, until peril came and the attack in front. She was sure that he would come back, anxious as of old lest the world should use her ill. But he did not come; and she felt oddly desolate, because he was so resolute and far away from her. Then she, too, turned to the moonlit window and to soldiery.
And the night crept on to dawn. From the fowl-yard at the rear of the house a cock began to crow half-heartedly. Nance, from her window, and the master of the house from his, looked out on a grey whirl of snow, reddened by the fingers of a frosty dawn.