Hugh laughed, and, rising leisurely, made his way down the garden to the rear door. Women were droll creatures, he reflected; his mother, of course, had always treated him with tenderness, but why these strangers should pamper him like a child, and concern themselves about his every movement, was more than he could puzzle out. From the first Nancy had made no end of commiserating him for the scar on his face, and even the widow herself, for all her sharp ways, had been melted to pity, when she came to examine his wardrobe. “Well, well, well! when did a woman put hand to these shirts?” she had cried, whereat Hugh informed her blushingly that ’twas his custom to have his shirts washed till they grew too tattered to serve even under a buff jacket, and then he threw them away. “You poor thriftless child!” sighed the widow, “sure, you’re not fit to be sent to the wars.” So she mended his shirts and stockings, and, when that way of showing her motherly care failed, brewed him ill-tasting concoctions of herbs, which Hugh swallowed courteously, though with inward protests against this expression of good-will. He was far more grateful when her kindness finally took the form of cooking him such food as he liked, and pressing him to eat at all times, for his illness had left him with an alarming appetite, which without such connivance could never have been decently satisfied. He halted now, as he had often done, with his elbows on the sill of the opened window in the long kitchen, and took a sweeping survey of the dressers and the fireplace and the brick oven. Just by the window stood a table at which the Widow Flemyng, with her sleeves tucked up and her broad face flushed, was rolling out pastry. “I marvel you’ve not been here before,” she said gruffly, as she caught sight of him; “where have you been all this morning now?” “Teasing the cat,” Hugh answered. “Before that I was down through the meadow—” The widow paused with her rolling-pin suspended. “That meadow again? And no doubt you wet your feet!” “On my word, good widow,” Hugh laughed, “my kinsfolk have trusted me abroad without a nurse for several years now.” “The more fools they!” she replied, smacking the pastry smartly once more. Profiting by the pause, Hugh reached one arm in at the window and helped himself to a strip of pie-crust, all hot and newly baked, that lay there; he might repress his early fondness for honey and jam, but crisp pastry was still too great a temptation for him to resist. “That’s a right Roundhead trick to come thieving at a poor woman’s window!” said the widow. “Was there never such a thing as a Cavalier thief?” Hugh suggested. “I never speak treason, sir. There do be some that say there is a garrison yonder at Woodstead Manor that never was known to pay for what it lives by, but I speak no ill of the king’s men, you’ll note.”