"Ah, true, grave brother. Let's get to Oxford, and the Duchess of Richmond will cure me of this folly, maybe. There, lad, not so fiery! It's no crime that a duchess should have pleasant eyes. Even princes must warm themselves at the hearth just now and then."
"What route to take?" asked Kit by and by, coming down from his pedestal of high, romantic gravity.
"We'll go by the sun so far as the winding roads will let us. Oxford lies south-west. Chance and the sun, between them, shall decide; but we had best keep free of towns and garrisons."
"Undoubtedly," growled Christopher. "There would be the finest eyes in England glancing at you through the lattices."
In this odd way the brothers, different in experience and outlook, but bound together by some deep tie of affection, took up the hazard of a ride that was to end, they hoped, at Oxford. There was a fine, heedless simplicity about it all, a trust in open country and the sun's guidance, that was bred in the Metcalf men.
CHAPTER VIII.
HOW THEY SOUGHT RUPERT.
They had not gone seven miles before they heard, wide on their bridle-hand, the braying of a donkey. It was not a casual braying, but a persistent, wild appeal that would not be denied.
"Brother calls to brother," said Michael, with his diverting obedience to superstition. "One of his kind helped me into York. We'll see what ails him."
They crossed a strip of barren moor, and came to a hollow where some storm of wind and lightning had long since broken a fir coppice into matchwood. And here, at the edge of the dead trunks and the greening bracken, they found five of their kinsmen hemmed in by fourteen stiff-built rascals who carried pikes. On the outskirts of the battle a donkey was lifting her head in wild appeal.