A resinous knot in the pine log exploded with miniature fierceness—a white flame jetted out, hissing, and dropped. The fire settled itself and the ashes slipped away, sighing. In the tense silence these small sounds made emphasis; while without, ever and anon, the blast came rolling up the slope from the far distance, dashed through the frantic swaying firs with screams of triumph, to hurl itself against the sturdy walls, there to break and part on either side and dash onward once more. … So comes the charge of horse against the solid mass of foot with ever-gathering speed, rider and beast together, in one frenzied impetus, to break themselves against the serried pikes.… * * * * * “Your father fell beside me at Naseby,” said Rockhurst presently, as if speaking to himself. The incisive note had vanished from his voice. Farrant rose from the table and came towards him, with something of the schoolboy’s mien, who half resents his master’s anger and half hopes to see him mollified. Rockhurst went on musingly:— “He and I were neck and neck through Edgehill, Newbury, Marston Moor.… Until that hour I was young, younger than you are. And in those days I had mighty thoughts. But in my mightiest I never saw myself reaching to his level. If I could but keep my nag’s head close to his, and go where he led, leap where he leaped—’twas enough for me.… When he fell, struck down by Ireton’s pikes, I thought the world grew dark.… Then I was young, Master Paul. And now, sitting in this chair to-night”—Rockhurst slowly straightened himself and turned his head toward Farrant—“I find there is still something left in me of the old self that I had deemed to be dead this many a year. Enough to be glad to-night, sir, that your father is dead.—Paul Farrant,” went on the elder slowly, “speak: had the luck turned as you hoped, upon what foundation would you have built your winnings?” The other hesitated, stammered, made a fresh abortive effort to brazen it out. “Nay, my lord, the world hardly knows you so squeamish. If such rigid rules obtained at Whitehall we should be a dull lot, and many a merry hour lost. Did your lordship say you had charged Ireton’s men? By those tenets we might have dreamed that your place had rather been among the precisians.…” A subtle change swept over Rockhurst’s countenance. The air of grave severity, the shadow of regretful tenderness, passed from him, to be replaced by the mocking glance, the expression at once reckless and cynical which, before the world’s eyes, characterised the man who had won for himself—among a company of reprobates—that second if scarcely more appropriate nickname of his, “Rakehell Rockhurst.”