Hugh blinked at the fire and made no answer. Ridydale mused aloud. Then, as Hugh still kept silent, Ridydale suggested they get to bed, and led the way up the steep ladder to the loft. There were two pallets in Ridydale’s rough chamber, and Hugh wondered impersonally, as he lay down on one, what trooper the corporal had violently dispossessed of his quarters to make room for him. At the foot of the pallet, in the sloping roof, was a small window, through which Hugh found, after the candle was out, he could see five bright stars and a patch of purple-black sky. He lay staring at the stars and saw no meaning in them, for thinking busily to himself and trying to comprehend that his parents had been neither all good nor utterly depraved, but just frail everyday human creatures, whom he must love and bear with for their humanness. Next morning he awoke of his own accord, without being kicked, and, finding the room empty and a sunbeam coming through the little window, rose up and went briskly below stairs. Late though he was, the woman gave him all the breakfast he wanted, and then force of habit took him over to the stable.Saxon greeted him, and the other men merely pestered him with questions but gave him no blows. With a feeling that it was not yet time to proclaim his identity to all, Hugh answered evasively, and then, because it was irksome to be idle, he watered one of the horses, and, as Unger had bidden him the day before, began patching up a headstall. He was sitting on a keg, fumbling with a refractory buckle, when Ridydale bore down upon him with a fierce, Arguing that if he were still a stable-boy Ridydale had the right to command him, and if he were a gentleman Ridydale’s friendliness had given him the right to make requests, Hugh laid aside the headstall and went meekly back to the cottage, where till dinner time he lounged ingloriously on the doorstone. After the noon meal Ridydale, very sullen and wrathful, beckoned him outside and rated him, respectfully but severely. “’Tis not becoming a gentleman like you to fetch and carry for those dogs of troopers,” he explained. It was so ludicrously like the view of what befitted a gentleman which up to a fortnight ago he himself had held that Hugh could not help smiling. “Methinks ’tis not what a gentleman does but how he does it makes the disgrace,” he said. Ridydale shook his head and looked dubious, then, coming apparently to a better temper, changed the subject by offering to lend Hugh money with which to buy fresh clothes. “The colonel will be here to-night,” he concluded, “and I’ve a plan to wait a good-natured moment and tell him of you. I’m thinking he’ll ask to see you, and you should not come before him in such rags as these.”