There are times--moments set thick with trouble, when faith and all else seem drowning in the flood--that compel us to struggle free of reticence. Oliphant of Muirhouse was not aware that there was anything singular or unseemly in this spoiled wife’s statement of her case. Nance answered to the direct appeal; for her own heart was bruised, and fragrant with the herb named pity. And Rupert, for his part, stood aside and gazed at his mother across the red, murky twilight, and wondered how it came that one of his dreams was answered after all. In face and voice and tender uprightness of figure, this mother of his was something near the ideal he had woven round her, despite her careless handling of him in the years gone by. “Ah, there!” said Lady Royd, with a coquettish, gentle laugh. “Nance was talking not long ago of love and knighthood and all that--the baby girl!--and I rapped her over the knuckles with my fan. It’s a humdrum world we live in, Mr. Oliphant; and, by that token, you will come in to supper before you carry on the news.” “Not even a mouthful and a glass of wine out here; as for coming in to the meal I crave--why, I dare not do it, by your leave. Sleep is waiting so near to me, to trip me up in the middle of my errand.” She glanced at him, with the instinct that is never far from women to play the temptress. “You look so tired,” she said gently. “Surely your news will wait? A warm hearth, Mr. Oliphant, and the meal you need----” “You said just now that house-walls and food and drink were of little consequence--unless you had strong hands about you.” “But you’re strong of your hands already. And I am weak.” “Yes,” said Oliphant, “passably strong; but it is each man to his trade, my lady. The hands I need--they greet me on the uplands, when my horse and I are so tired out that it is laughable. We get up into the roomy moors--our business lies in that sort of country--and the curlews go crying, crying, as if their sorrow could not rest since a Stuart once was martyred. And we gather up our courage, my horse and I.” “You men,” she broke in fretfully--“your thoughts run always up the hills. And you find only the old feuds--a Stuart martyred near a hundred years ago, a king who’s earth and bone-dust by this time, as we shall be one day. It matters so little, Mr. Oliphant, when we come to the end of our lives--to the end of our singing-time.” Oliphant of Muirhouse had learned the hardest of life’s lessons--a broad and catholic simplicity; and in the learning he had gained an added edge to the temper that now was lithe as steel. “King Charles is neither earth nor bone-dust,” he said pleasantly. “He is--alive, my lady, and he knows that we remember.” “Remembrance? What of that?” asked the other lazily. “Just last year’s rose-leaves, sir, with the faded scent about them. By your leave, Mr. Oliphant, I thought you more workmanlike and modern.”