And Rupert had his own thoughts, too, in this silence they were sharing. He knew to a heart-beat the way of his love for Nance, the gladness and the torture of it; and again he wondered, with passionate dismay, that he had done so little to make himself a man of both worlds, ready to fight through the open roads for her. He had given her a regard that, by its very strength and quality, was an honour in the giving and the receiving; he had built high dreams about her, feeling her remote and unattainable; but he had failed in common sense, in grasp of the truth that a man, before he reaches the hilltops where high dreams find reality, must climb the workaday, rough fields. He understood all this, knew for the first time that his father had been just in leaving him behind, because the fighting-line needs men who can use their two hands, can sit a horse, can face, not death only but all the harsh, unlovely details that war asks of men. His humiliation was bitter and complete. There was Nance, sitting at the spinet, the gusty candlelight playing about her trim, royal little figure, and she was desirable beyond belief; and yet he knew that she stood, not for faith only but for deeds, that he had only gone a few paces on the road that led to the fulfilment of his dreams. The silence was so intimate, so full of the strife that hinders comrade souls at times, that Nance knew she was not alone. She glanced up, saw Rupert standing in the doorway, read the misery and longing in his face. For women have a gift denied to men--they see us as an open book, clear for them to read, while we can only sight them at odd moments, like startled deer that cross the mountain mists. “You’re sad, my dear,” she said, with pleasant handling of the intimacy that had held between them since they were boy and girl together. “No,” he answered, hard pressed and dour. “I am--your fool, Nance, as I always was.” “Come sit beside me,” she commanded. “I shall sing Stuart songs to you--sing them till you hear the pipes go screeling up Ben Ore, till I see the good light in your face again.” Her tenderness was hard to combat. “I need no Stuart songs,” he said, with savage bluntness. “Why, then, you’re changeable. You liked them once.” “I’ll like them again, Nance--but not to-night. It is Stuart deeds I ask, and they do not come my way.” Rupert had crossed to the spinet, and, as he stood looking down at her with grave eyes, Nance was aware of some new mastery about him, some rugged strength that would have nothing of this indoor, parlour warmth. “Rupert, what is amiss with you?” she asked gravely. He was himself again--scholarly, ironic. “What is amiss? You, and the house where I’m left among the women, because I have learned no discipline--it is a pleasant end, Nance, to my dreams of the riding out. Your fool, listening to his mother’s spaniel whining as she puts him to bed, and the empty house, and the wind that calls men out to the open--just that.”