They carried Christopher into the tavern, and the Squire thrust the gaping onlookers from the room and shut the door. He thought the lad was dying.
Kit lay on the lang-settle. The dancing firelight showed the pallor of his face, the loose, helpless surrender of limbs and body.
"I cared for the lad too much, maybe," growled the Squire. "He was littlish, as we Metcalfs go, and a man's heart yearns, somehow, about the baby of a flock."
For two hours he watched, and then Kit stirred. "The louts bandied Joan's name about," the lad murmured.
"Ay, so they did. Get up and fight, lad Christopher—for Joan."
Kit obeyed the summons with a promptness that dismayed the Squire. He got to his feet, looked about him, and moved across the floor; then his legs grew weak under him, and he tottered to the settle.
"Tell her it doesn't matter either way," he said. "Tell her I'm for the King, as all the Metcalfs are."
He slept that night like a little child; and the Squire, watching beside him, returned to his own childhood. The bitterness of fever was over. Kit would live, he thought.
Pansy was early astir next morning, and moved among the servants of the Castle with an aloofness that enraged the women, with a shy, upward glance of her Puritan eyes that enthralled the men. She was demure and gentle; and when a lad came into the yard with his milking-cans, and said that there had been a bonnie fight in the village overnight, Pansy asked him how it had fared with Master Christopher.
"Oh, he?" said the lad, his eyes big and round at sight of her. "He was ready to die last night; but he's thought better of it, so they say."