“You did well, Nat,” he said gently. “Tell us how the ’15 went.” Nat was silent for a while. Across his dotage, across the memories that were food and drink to him, he returned to present-day affairs. He looked closely at the master, and nodded sagely. “You’re varry like your father, Maister Rupert. It seems a pity, like, you should be left here, to die like a ratten in a trap, when you might have been crying Tally-Ho along the Lunnon road.” The master winced. “They’ve not trapped us yet,” he said quietly. “Get down to the inglenook, Nat, and smoke your pipe.” “Hark!” said Shackleton, his ear turned to the window. “They’re getting merry out yonder. Begom! they must have found liquor somewhere, to go singing out o’ doors on a stark night like this.” A full-throated chorus was sounding now across the snow and the dancing red of the fire. The words were German, but the lilt of them was not to be mistaken. “I wish I’d known they were coming,” said Simon Foster ruefully. “There was a barrel of ale, master, left i’ the shippon because I was too lazy to get it indoors yesterday. And they’ve broached it, they have; and it’s good liquor going down furrin throats. The waste o’ decent stuff!” Rupert listened to the uproar out of doors. He had a quick imagination, and he was picturing an attack by drunken soldiery. These men of Goldstein’s, he had gathered, were not lambs when sober. He thought of Nance, of his mother--thought of the virile, tender love that men of his Faith give their women--and the soul of him caught fire. “Shackleton,” he said sharply, “keep your post. Simon, get to yours. And, by the God who made me, I’ll shoot you if you sleep to-night!” He did not see Nance, nor think of her, as he went to his own station overlooking the main door. But Nance heard his tread, and glanced up, and found the night emptier because he did not know that she was near. For men and women see life from opposite sides of the same hill, and always will until hereafter they find themselves standing on the same free, windy summit. He went to his post, and the long night settled down. And nothing happened, as of old. From sheer need of occupation, he fell to watching the snow fall thick and thicker out of doors--tried to count the flakes--and found the dumb, unceasing crowd of them enticing him to sleep. And then he sought a better remedy. He remembered the man he had hit through the opening of the courtyard gate--the others who had fallen to his musket; and he found the odd zest, the call of future peril, which spring from action. And to Rupert the call came with a peculiar sharpness; for he had been accounted slight, a scholar, and he was here in the thick of the siege perilous, with a deed or two standing already to his credit.