And then she left him. He watched her go down the slope on her fiddle-headed nag. All his buoyancy was gone. He had been spoiled by flattery, of word and glance; he had been accustomed to be taken at his surface value, giving his friends little opportunity to test whether he rang true or not. And now he was like a pampered child that meets its first rebuff. His pluck had left him. He had no heart to follow Nance, though by and by he would regret the lost opportunity to claim rough satisfaction for her handling of him. She had spoken, with such security and pride, of the loyalty that was an instinct with her. Her men who had ridden out were of the like mind; and Underwood, in a flash of enlightenment and dismay, saw how the coming days would go with him if this haphazard venture of the Prince’s carried him to London and the throne. His comfortable house of Underwood, his easy life, the dinners and the hunting and the balls--all would have to be given up. He had no illusions now as to his power to continue here among them, explaining his share in the enterprise, winning his way back to favour by excellence in field-sports and in ladies’ parlours. If the Prince came to his own, there would be an end of Wild Will, so far as loyal Lancashire was concerned; for at every turn he would have to meet the scorn that Nance had given him so unsparingly to-day. Nance looked back once, when she was half down the slope, and saw him sitting rigid in the saddle, horse and man showing in clear, lonely outline against the rainy sky. He would be himself again to-morrow, for shallowness can never suffer long; but she would have pitied him, may be, could she have guessed his bitter loneliness just now. Shorn of his self-love, Nance lost beyond hope of regaining--instinct told him so much--alive to the cowardice which no longer wore the more pleasant air of prudence, Underwood looked out on lands as forlorn as himself; and, far down the slope, he saw Nance’s little figure, and knew that, in some odd way that was better than himself, he loved this trim lass of Demaine’s. Nance reached the lower lands, where the bridle-track ran in and out beside the swollen streams, past coppices where the trees were comely in their winter’s nakedness. She saw each line and furrow of the pastures, remembered they had found a fox last month in the spinney yonder, recalled how she and Rupert had fished the brook together, just where it ran under the grey stone bridge below her. All her faculties seemed to be sharpened, rather than deadened, by the blow, pitiless and hard, that Will had given her just now. Her first love--the delicate and fragrant thing that had been interwoven with her waking and her dreaming hours--had died shamefully. She could not even bring a decent show of grief to the graveside; her only feeling was that it should be buried, in the middle of a dark midwinter’s night, out of all men’s sight and gossip.