“You are not proved yet?” said Nance, with a gentle laugh of raillery and comradeship. “And yet the men who come in from the Highlands—the men we have helped to safety, Lady Royd and I—bring another tale of you.”
Good women and bad are keen to play the temptress when they see a man hard set by the peril of his own wind-driven, eager heart; for Eve dies hard in any woman.
“There are others,” he said stubbornly—“loyal men who trust me to bring them into Edinburgh.”
“Scruples?” She mocked him daintily. “Women are not won by scruples.”
He looked at her with the disarming, boyish smile that she remembered from old days—the smile which hid a purpose hard as steel. “Then women must be lost, Nance,” he answered suavely.
Nance looked at him. He had changed since the days when her least whim had swayed him more than did the giving of her whole heart now. He was steady and unyielding, like a rock against which the winds beat idly. And suddenly a loneliness came over her, a wild impatience of men’s outlook. She recalled the day at Windyhough, just after Sir Jasper had ridden out, when Lady Royd had complained that honour was more to a man than wife-love and his home’s need of him. She remembered how, with a girl’s untutored zeal, she had blamed Sir Jasper’s wife because she could not realise the high romance of it. But now she understood.
“You rode out to prove yourself—for my sake and the Cause?” she said, with cool disdain.
“Yes, Nance.”
“And you found—adventure. And your name is one to kindle hero-worship wherever loyal fugitives meet and speak of you. Oh, you shall have your due, Rupert! But in the doing of it the hard endeavour grew dear in itself—dearer than life, than—than little Nance Demaine, for whose sake you got to horse.”
He flushed, knowing she spoke truth; and he stood at bay, ashamed of what should have been his pride. And then he returned, by habit, to the mood taught him by night-riding and the over-arching skies.