Goldstein’s men came at the gate again, struck savagely, found by chance a weak spot in the wood. And this time they splintered a wide opening. They drew back a little, to get their breath, and through the opening Rupert saw faintly in the moonlight the half of a man’s body. Simon Foster, watching him, saw a still, passionless light steal into his eyes as he lifted the musket to his shoulder and fired with brisk precision. There was a cry of anguish from without, a sudden, heavy fall, and afterwards the guttural voice of Captain Goldstein, bidding his troopers clear the dead away and ram the gate again. Rupert, for his part, was reloading. And he was tasting that exquisite, tragic glee known only to those who kill their first man in righteous battle. He was drinking from a well old as man’s history; and its waters, while they swept compunction and all else away, gave him a strange zest for this world’s adventures. The troopers were desperate now. They rammed the splintered gate with a fury that broke the cross-bars; and Lady Royd, watching it all from the porch, saw a troop of savages, dusky in the moonlight--let loose from hell, so it seemed to her disordered fancy--swarm through the opening. She glanced at Rupert, saw him take careful aim again; and this time there was no cry from the fallen, for he dropped dead in his paces, so suddenly that the man behind tripped over him. Simon Foster, who had preached the gospel of steadiness so constantly to the young master, aimed wildly at Goldstein, and missed him by a foot; but Shackleton, slow and sure by temperament, picked out a hulking fellow for his mark and hit him through the thigh. “Get to the house!” said Rupert, his new mastery sitting firm and lightly on him. Like the Prince in retreat, he stood aside till his men had found safety, and then passed in himself. A few shots spattered on the house-front, and one grazed his shoulder; but the enemy were huddled too close together in the courtyard, and they jostled one another while talking hurried aim. Just in time he leaped across the threshold, clashed the main door in Goldstein’s face, and shot the bolts home. Inside, the first note that greeted him was the yapping of his mother’s spaniel. And his eyes sought Nance’s with instinctive humour. “Rupert, how can you smile?” asked Lady Royd, distraught and fretful. “Because needs must, mother,” he answered gently. “And now, by your leave, you will take Nance upstairs. There’s work to be done down here.” Nance touched his arm in passing. He did not know it. Body, and soul, and mind, he was bent on this work of holding Windyhough for his father and the Prince. He had lived with loneliness and patience and denial of all enterprise; and now there was a virile havoc about the house. “Now for the good siege, Simon,” he said, listening to the uproar out of doors. CHAPTER XV THE BRUNT OF IT