The boy, bated to desperation, stood clenching and unclenching his hands, fighting back the furious tears. The other, his back to the flames, stood looking at him some time in silence. Then, into his pitiless hawk’s eye came a gleam of humour—a slight softening of compassion, perhaps. The mind that once yields to humour can rarely continue to entertain the deadly earnestness of anger. Rockhurst yawned again, drew some crumpled sheets from his pocket and flung them on the table. “Now, look you, Sir Paul,” said he, good-naturedly, “I care not for this mood. Devise me but something of an entertainment for this evening—an entertainment, mind you, that shall honestly entertain me—why then, I’ll stake again; I’ll stake these, which represent your indebtedness to me, against your inventiveness. Shorten but a couple of hours for me, and I’ll shorten my memory of this night’s business. Zounds, never stare so! Do you not understand? ’Tis your wit for your honour—and the chance of a lifetime to prove yourself a man of resource!” For an instant Paul Farrant’s countenance became illumined; he made a hasty step forward. Then he hesitated, and, in renewed dismay, put his hand to his forehead. In the middle of the snow-drift, with a condemned cellar and an ugly housekeeper, debarred from gambling, debarred from fighting, his brain paralysed by a crushing sense of failure and folly—to devise amusement for this fastidious, caustic nobleman, what a task! He moved to the window, in reality more to hide his fresh mortification than to examine the prospect of the weather. It was to find that there was a lull in the snowfall, that the wind had rent a gap between the brooding clouds and revealed a patch of starry sky ridden by the sickle of a young moon. Through the swaying trees gleamed fitfully a distant red fire, and beyond it, further down the waste, a steadier yellow light came and went, as the wind bowed and released some plumy fir branch: the iron-smelting forge of the Hammer Pond! The inn at Liphook! Now, he remembered him, the smelter was a man of infinite popularity, the jester of the countryside; one who could sing a rousing stave to the clank of his hammer, and crack you the drollest stories over the home-brewed, were it only strong enough. Failing him, there was the innkeeper of the Anchor, at Liphook. Mine host had the secret of a noted posset that his Majesty himself, halting on the Portsmouth Road, had once generously praised. Nay, at the inn he might possibly pick up some belated traveller, whose conversation—he bitterly thought—would prove more acceptable than his own. At any rate, ’twas all the hope he had to cling to. Rockhurst never spared. “If your lordship will give me _congé_ for a short while,” he cried, turning back to the room, “I shall endeavour to meet your wishes.… We may not be so destitute of entertaining company at Farrant Chace as your lordship deems.”