He put his hand on her arm--gently, as a lover or a courtier might. “Maurice should have been the heir. It cannot be helped, mother--but you’ve been kind to me through it all.” Lady Royd was dismayed. Her husband had yielded to her whims; the folk about her had liked her beauty, her easy, friendly insolence, the smile which comes easily to women who are spoilt and have luxury at command. She had been sure of herself till now--till now, when the son she had made light of was at pains to salve her conscience. He was a stay-at-home, a weakling. There was no glamour attaching to him, no riding-out to high endeavour among the men who were making or were marring history. Yet now, to the mother’s fancy, he was big of stature. She yielded to a sharp, dismaying pity. “My dear,” she said, with a broken laugh, “you talk like your father--like your father when I like him most and disagree with his mad view of life.” Rupert went to bed that night--after his father and Maurice had returned muddied from a hunt he had not shared, after the supper that had found him silent and without appetite--with a sense of keen and personal disaster that would not let him sleep. Through all his dreams--the brave, unspoiled dreams of boyhood--he had seen this Rising take its present shape. His father’s teaching, his stealthy reading in the library of books that could only better a sound Stuart faith, had prepared him for the Loyal Meet that was to gather at Windyhough with to-morrow’s dawn. But in his dreams he had been a rider among loyal riders, had struck a blow here and there for the Cause he had at heart. In plain reality, with the wind sobbing round the gables overhead, he was not disciplined enough to join the hunt. He was untrained. Maurice shared his elder brother’s bedroom; and somewhere in the dark hours before the dawn he heard Rupert start from a broken sleep, crying that the Prince was in some danger and needed him. Maurice was tired after the day’s hunting, and knew that he must be up betimes; and a man’s temper at such times is brittle. “Get to sleep, Rupert!” he growled. “The Prince will be none the better for your nightmares.” Rupert was silent. He knew it was true. No man would ever be the better, he told himself, for the help of a dreamer and a weakling. He heard his brother turn over, heard the heavy, measured breathing. He had no wish for sleep, but lay listening to the sleet that was driving at the window-panes. It was bitter cold, and dark beyond belief. Whatever chanced with the Prince’s march to London, there was something to chill the stoutest faith in this night-hour before the dawn. Yet the scholar chose this moment for a sudden hope, a warmth of impulse and of courage. Down the sleety wind, from the moors he loved, a trumpet-call seemed to ring sharp and clear. And the call sounded boot-and-saddle.