"You accursed coward!"
"Ah, Mr. Benham; you may need your own courage presently."
Little did Jasper guess that Jeremy and Surgeon Stott were walking up and down the meadow within a hundred paces of the house. The surgeon kept a shrewd eye cocked on the windows. He moistened his lips with a dry tongue, and leered knowingly at his own thoughts.
"He will either have to bolt, Jerry, or we shall starve him out. The fellow is trying what insolence will do. I'll wager that he'll come out hat in hand before long."
Jeremy was not so sanguine.
"It is not all wind, Stott. There's pith in the chap. I wish I knew his game."
"Sit tight—that's ours. Rummy affair, Jeremy, some twenty Englishmen blockading Frenchmen in an English house! We must keep two men on the watch all night, with one of us to go the rounds."
And Jeremy agreed.
There was a full moon that night, and Nance, sitting at her window, knew that the moon had risen by the huge black shadow of the house that covered the yard and stables and spread across the orchard. She was vividly awake, alert, overstrung, ready for anything to happen. As the moon climbed higher the shadow of the house shortened, and she could see the orchard and the figure of a man going to and fro among the trees. The moonlight glinted on a musket barrel, and made his face look a grey patch when he turned at each end of his beat.
Brick House had been restless. There had been a stamping of feet in the attics overhead, and a rending sound as though men were splitting the woodwork with hatchets. But for an hour absolute silence had held, and the sentry out yonder might have thought the place asleep.