Nance, too, lay awake. She was busy with what Lady Royd had named the rosemary of life. All her instincts rose in warm defence of that view of honour which Sir Jasper’s wife had slighted. And there were men, men in their own midst, who could love in the old knightly way. There was Will Underwood--and so she lost herself, half between waking and dreaming, in a maze of high perfection that she reared about his person. Of a truth Wild Will was in danger, had he known it. He had pressed his suit on Nance, had urged it, in and out of season, during the months that preceded this upset of the Rising. He had captured her fancy already, and her heart might follow any day; but he did not guess what simplicity and breadth of tenderness she would bring him, what answering devotion she would ask. Nance had the double gift--she had the woman’s instincts, the woman’s suppleness of fancy, but she had been reared in a house where a big, downright father and big, uncompromising brothers had trained her to the man’s code of life. She would never come to the wooing as to a one-sided bargain, giving all meekly and asking nothing in return. She would ask, with tenderest persistence, that her man, as she had said to Lady Royd, should claim knighthood at her hands once every while. Marriage, to her unproved heart, was a thing magical, renewing its romance each day--but renewing, too, that every-day and hard endeavour on which the true romance is founded. And so she got to sleep at last, and woke in terror. She had dreamed that Will Underwood, engaged in a single-handed fight against a company of the Prince’s enemies, lay wounded sorely; and she had reached out hands, impotent with nightmare, to succour him, and she had seen him fall. At the end of the long, draughty corridor, not many yards away from her, Rupert was fighting his new trouble. He and Simon had been engaged on the King’s business--or the pretence of it--during these excursions that had taken them afield for two days past. But he could only remember now what had driven him into endeavour--how he had come home to find Nance flushed and eager, Simon carrying a couple of muskets; and how she had told him, in plain words, that women must needs take up soldiery, because the men about the house were so infirm.