"I grudge the danger—for that is doubled, lass, when a maid fights with a man, as thou would’st fight with Ratcliffe of Wildwater. Hark ye, Nell! Thy journey might be the worst sort of disaster. At the best it would be fruitless, for he is like to have taken Mistress Wayne and fled to the Low Country, where dalliance, they say, goes free of punishment and fair feud is reckoned lawless." "Rolf, I never dreamed that could be!" she cried, dismayed. "Would he not wait one night, think’st thou? Not one little night, to give me time——" "He is gone by this, if I know his spirit. There, lass! Let me take thee safe home to Marsh, and rest sure that Ratcliffe is beyond thy reach or mine." Wayne of Cranshaw, scarce believing his own tale, meant to cross to Wildwater soon as he had turned Nell from her purpose; but while he spoke, there came a sudden clattering of horse-hoofs, and after that a jingling of reins and a gruff call for liquor, as the two horses pulled up sharp in front of the tavern doorway. The one thought leaped into the girl’s mind and into Wayne’s of Cranshaw. "Rolf," she cried, "what if he be coming to us? What if Ratcliffe and my stepmother have put off flight an hour too long?" "It may be so—ay, it may be so," muttered Wayne, as they moved over the wet gravestones toward the tavern. The moonlight showed them a cumbrous post-chaise, and harnessed to it a pair of bays, smoking from the rough, up-hill scramble. A postillion stood at the leader’s head, holding a horn of old October in one hand and cursing the untoward weather as he blew the froth from off the top. "We knew the Ratcliffe spirit, and we knew thy father’s wife," said Wayne bitterly, pointing to the chaise. "I warrant we shall not need hunt our fox to-night, Nell." "Is there no doubt, think ye? Rolf, I feared we had lost the chance," muttered Nell, clutching at her dagger. But he caught her wrist. "Lass," he said, so tenderly that the tears came unbidden to her eyes, "what is thine is mine hereafter, and I will take the blows for my share of the burden. A bargain, Nell, between us; if he come to-night, the fight is mine; if he fail, then I will let thee go and seek him." She turned for a backward look at the Wayne vault, hidden by its flat, iron-ringed stone; and she wondered if her father would like Rolf to strike the blow, in place of the daughter who had loved him through the years of trouble. "They will lift that stone in three days’ time," she muttered aimlessly; "and we shall see the last of father, and know that the worms are making merry with his flesh. It seems hard, for he was a better man than any in the moorside—save thou." And then the "save thou" brought back her womanishness for a space; and she fell to sobbing in his arms; and the churchyard gate, up above them, began to grumble on its hinges.