“Likely to be our only one,” snapped his neighbour, “if this cursed snow stays on the ground. And we can drink half the night, Underwood--but not all the day as well. You can have too much of a pastime.” “What are they doing London way, I wonder?” put in a smooth-faced youngster, gibing at himself and all of them. “They’ll have bonnie roads to travel.” Underwood remembered a day, not long ago, when he had met Nance Demaine on the moor, recalled the look in her face as she gave him her kerchief and bade him use it as a flag of truce “when her men returned from the crowning.” He got to his feet and reached across the table with clenched fist. “How dare you!” he said savagely. “We’re all wearing the white feather, and you twit us with it, you young fool.” They drew back from him for a moment. His pain and fury were so evident, his easy-going temper so completely broken, that they thought him drunk, when in reality he was vastly sober--so sobered that he saw himself a creature pitiful and time-serving. And the youngster, taking fire in turn, said that he would be called fool by no man without asking satisfaction; and swords would have been out had not Underwood’s neighbour, a jolly, red-faced squire who liked to drink his wine in peace, taken the situation at a canter. “For shame, Underwood!” he said, laying a sharp hand on his shoulder. “It would be no duel--it would be another slaughter of the innocents. To fight a boy like that----” “Not very innocent, by your leave,” broke in the youngster, with such palpable affront, such pride in his budding vices, that the old squire laughed outrageously. “By gad! not very innocent!” he echoed, with another rolling laugh. “See the cockrel standing up to crow--all red about the gills, gentlemen. Let’s fill our glasses and drink to his growing comb.” So it ended in frank laughter as they rose and drowned the quarrel in a roaring toast. But Underwood, though he joined them, carried no good look. He was still thinking of Nance Demaine, of the white badge she had offered him. And an uneasy silence settled on them all. “I heard a queer tale to-day, Will,” said the red-faced squire presently, by way of lifting the talk into easier channels. “Old Luke Faweather met me on the road. He was coming home from market on that fat, piebald horse of his, and he pulled up. He’d ridden wide of Windyhough, it seemed, and swore that he heard gunshots through the snow--rattle after rattle, he said, as if half the moorside were letting off their guns.” “Oh, Luke!” laughed Underwood, rousing himself from his evil mood. “We know his market-days. He hears and sees queer things at home-coming--carries the bottle in his head, as the saying goes.”