"Do you know, mistress, what I found at the gate this morning?" asked the maid, as they went through the pleasant vale of Wensley.
"I could not guess, Pansy."
"Why, a stirrup-iron. Horseshoes are lucky enough, but a stirrup-iron——"
Joan laughed eagerly; she had the country superstitions close at heart, because she, too, was a daleswoman. "There's a knight riding somewhere for me, Pansy."
"Knights are as knights do," said the other, with the Puritan tartness ingrained in her. "For my part, I'll hope he's better than most men. It's not asking much."
"In the doldrums, girl? I shall have to train you. It's easier to laugh, than cry—that's the true Royalist faith."
Pansy—half maid, half confidante, and altogether spoiled—began to whimper. "It's easy to laugh, with all the road in front of you, and a riding knight ahead. I've no man to think of, and that leaves a woman lonesome-like."
"It is not for want of suitors," said Joan, humouring her maid as good mistresses do. "You had your choice of the dalesmen, Pansy."
Pansy bridled a little and shifted her headgear to a more becoming angle. "Ay, but they're rough." Her speech relapsed into the mother-tongue she had tried often to forget. "A lass that kens more doesn't mate with the li'le bit less. She has her pride."
The mistress did not answer, but fell into a long reverie. What was true of the maid was true of herself. Young Kit Metcalf, riding for the King, was just "the li'le bit less," somehow. She had a regard for him, half real and half fanciful; but he seemed shut off from her by some intangible difference that was not uncouthness, but something near to it. He was big and forthright, and shocked her daintiness.