She got down from the stile, rebellious, fitful as a gusty spring. It was only when they neared the homestead that she turned, her eyes bright and eager, and touched his hand. "I am glad—oh, I am glad!" she said.
Late that afternoon Miss Bingham and little Blake had gone for a moorland ride together. Blake had made a false recovery from his weakness, as soon as he learned that there was to be another riding-out, and had urged that he must get his mare in trim again by daily rides. And Miss Bingham had insisted that his nurse went with him, lest he fell by the way.
In all her wide experience of men she had not met one so gay, so tranquil, so entirely master of what had been, of what was to come, as this little Irishman whose health had gone down the stream of high adventure. With a broken heart and a broken body, he thought only of the coming rides through lonely night-roads, of Meccas riding again for the King they served, of the dust and rain of circumstance. He remembered droll stories, flavoured by Irish wit and heedlessness. He fell, between whiles, into passionate hope of what was to come, when the King came to his own in the south country, by help of the Riding Metcalfs, and drove the rebels from the north. Then, with a gentleness that laughed at itself, he explained that it was good to have sat on the ferry-steps at Knaresborough.
"I lost—but the stakes were well worth winning. The Blakes were ever gamblers."
She had great skill in tending the wounded. In the man's face she read many signs of bodily weakness. His voice—his detachment from the gross affairs of life—told their own tale. But she did not look for it so soon.
At the gate of the farmstead, just as he dismounted, Blake fell prone in the roadway, and tried to rise, and could not.
When Joan and Kit Metcalf returned—it might be a half-hour later—they found Miss Bingham kneeling at the dead man's side. And her face, when she lifted it, was a woman's face—grave, charitable, tender with some forward hope.
"Here's little Blake," she said. "He rides very well, my friends."
THE END.
LONDON: WARD, LOCK & Co., LIMITED.