Only for an instant was she thus. Then she felt arms flung around her, tenderly, lovingly, while listening to speech which promised to relieve her of her misery.
“I was so glad, Vag,” said Sabrina, “hearing what you said. And I’ve heard something said by another, at which you’ll be glad, when I tell it you.”
Almost at the same instant of time, though in a different part of the grounds, Sir Richard Walwyn was in like manner promising to let light into the heart of Eustace Trevor.
Chapter Thirty Six.
After Roundway Down.
An hundred horsemen riding at their hardest—not in any military formation, but strung out in a straggled ruck—horsemen steel-clad from crown to hip, some with helmets battered; others bare-headed, the head-piece gone; cuirasses showing dints, as from stroke of halberd or thrust of pike; on back and breastplate blood splashes, dried and turned purple-black; boots, mud-bespattered and délabré—this damaged cohort all that remained of “William the Conqueror’s” army!
They were the remnant of Hesselrig’s Horse, the “Lobsters” in retreat from Roundway Down, where the chivalrous, but too reckless, too confident Waller, had given battle to the outnumbering enemy under Byron and Wilmot; been defeated, and put to utter rout.
It was the wind up of a series of sanguinary engagements with the Marquis of Hertford and Prince Maurice, commencing with an encounter on the low-wooded bottom between Tog and Friznoll hills, so hotly contested that veterans there engaged, who had gone through all the Low Country and German campaigns, declared the most furious fights they ever had abroad were but sport to it.