The time came when Master Neville, with every man of any mind or energy in the country, was roused by the state of public affairs—when he had no longer leisure to manufacture his flies and ponder over his stage saws—when he was rarely at home, or else had a host of company with him. Riders and runners—posts, with carefully sealed and disposed of letters, were constantly drawing bridle, or pausing footsore under the gateway of the court. There was an eager rummaging out of rusty matchlocks and swords, and an arming and marshalling of the servants, and such tenants as Master Neville’s example and authority constrained. At last a compact band of some twenty or thirty retainers, with the squire—looking a proper man in his glittering steel morion and breastplate—dashed with a flourish out of the courtyard. But first Master Neville stood ready to start in the hall, and looked for an instant all around him, from the musicians’ gallery to the deep recesses of the window that were draped with clematis and jessamine. There was nobody to take leave of save Roy and Reine, till Dame Hynd, covertly wiping her eyes, stole to the door, under pretence of receiving her master’s last orders, for he was not a man who could brook spying on his privacy, or an unsolicited intrusion into states of feeling which he did not confess even to himself, whether the offender were intimate friend or old servant. She discovered Master Neville, in what looked like a reverie, drawing Roy’s ears through the fingers of one hand, and holding up a finger of the other to enjoin on Reine the refraining from that jealousy to which she was prone. “I am afraid the little brutes will have forgot my pretty lessons, and will be as stupid and fat as yourself, dame, before I return,” he said, with a mixture of mockery and rudeness, testy at the interruption; and then he turned and begged her to forgive him, with an odd candid sweetness that went far to breaking her heart. “Very likely that day will never come, and so you will not mind this piece of impudence any more than the rest of my offences. You will keep the house, though it be for my worshipful cousin and heir, and see that, so far as you can help it, neither old horse nor dog” (he was somewhat ashamed of his partiality for the foolish spaniels, and thus did not particularise them further), “which I am leaving behind me, come to grief. And you will wish me good-bye and good luck; hey, dame?” It was a breezy summer morning when Master Neville rode away at the head of his band. It was a foggy winter day, with years between, when he came back, attended by no more than two followers, and, shrouded in the early darkness of a December afternoon, sought to get into the old court, to spend a single night there. His arrival was unexpected; but though it had been otherwise, neither Dame Hynd, who remembered not only his marriage but his baptism, nor any other attached family friend, dared have made the least demonstration of joy and welcome.