“No!” His fierceness shocked her; for until now she had been unused to vehemence. “Lies never served a good cause yet. I told him--God forgive me, Agnes!--that he would be needed here. He has pluck, and this notion of leadership--it went to his head like wine, and I felt as if I’d offered drink to a lad whose head was too weak for honest liquor.” She moved restlessly about the hall. “Yet in the summer you had kegs of gunpowder brought in,” she said by and by--“under the loaded hay-wagons, you remember, lest George’s spies were looking on?” There would be little room for tenderness in the days that were coming, and, perhaps for that reason, Sir Jasper drew his wife toward him now. He was thinking of the haytime, of the last load brought in by moonlight, of the English strength and fragrance of this country life to which he was saying good-bye. “I wooed you in haytime, Agnes, and married you when the men were bending to their scythes the next year, and we brought the gunpowder in at the like season. We’ll take it for an omen.” “And yet,” she murmured, with remembrance of her son--the son who was the firstfruit of their wooing--“you said that you had lied to Rupert when you bade him guard the house. Why bring in gunpowder, except to load your muskets with?” He sighed impatiently. This parting from the wife and son grew drearier the closer it approached. “We had other plans in the summer. It was to be a running fight, we thought, from Carlisle down through Lancashire. Every manor was to be held as a halting-place when the Prince’s army needed rest.” He crossed to the big western window of the hall, and stood looking up at the moonlit, wintry hills. Then he turned again, not guessing that his son was standing in the shadows close at his right hand. “Other counsels have prevailed,” he said, with the snappishness of a man who sees big deeds awaiting him and doubts his human strength. “I think the Prince did not know, Agnes, how slow we are to move in Lancashire--how quick to strike, once we’re sure of the road ahead. Each manor that held out for the King--it would have brought a hundred doubters to the Cause; the army would have felt its way southward, growing like a snowball as it went. They say the Prince overruled his counsellors. God grant that he was right!” “So there’s to be no siege of Windyhough?” asked Lady Royd slowly. “None that I can see. It is to be a flying charge on London. The fighting will be there, or in the Midlands.” “That is good hearing, so far as anything these days can be called good hearing. Suppose your lie had prospered, husband? Suppose Rupert had had to face a siege in earnest here? Oh, I’ve been blind, but now I--I understand the shame you would have put on him, when he was asked to hold the house and could not.” “He could!” snapped Sir Jasper. “I’ve faith in the lad, I tell you. A Royd stands facing trouble always when the pinch comes.”