"And you?"
"I stay on here for a while. It seems to be my business these days to batter walls down, and to stay on afterwards to build them up again. This town is worth defending for the King. Tell Lady Derby that my march to the relief of York will go by way of Lathom, if I may claim her hospitality."
Kit Metcalf found himself among the hundred chosen to accompany Lord Derby; and he was glad, for in Oxford—with its deep, unconquerable love of attaching mystic glamour to a person or a cause—the Lady of Lathom had grown to be a toast drunk silently, as if she were above and beyond the noise of praise.
That evening, as the sundown reddened over Lathom House—the sultry, rain-packed heat aglow on broken battlements—they came through the camp deserted lately by Colonel Rigby. A sentry challenged them; and Lord Derby laughed as any boy might do.
"A Stanley for the King! Have I been away so long, Thornthwaite, that you do not know your lord?"
The master, as usual, had the keener vision. In the clear light he had recognised the sentry as one old in service to his household. They passed through; and in the courtyard Lady Derby was standing near the captured mortar, talking of ways and means with one of her captains.
To Kit, looking on, it was like fairyland come true. Lady Derby heard her husband's step, glanced up, and ran to meet him.
"My lord—my dear, dear lord, have you come back?"
"Ay, like a bridegroom, wife."
They forgot the onlookers, forgot turmoil and great hardship. There comes seldom to any man and wife so fine a forgetting. It was well, Kit thought, to carry three wounds to his knowledge—and some lesser ones that did not count—to have seen these two with the red halo of the sundown round them.