She was desolate, this child who sat in the window-seat and constructed all afresh the picture of her hero-lover. She was weaving one of the samplers she despised, after all--not with wool and canvas, but in fancy’s loom. Obstinate in her demand for vivid drama, she was following Will Underwood already on this errand that the Prince had entrusted to his care. She saw him riding through the dangerous night roads, and prayed for his safety, at each corner of a highway peopled with assassins. She saw him galloping recklessly in open daylight, meeting odds laughable in their overwhelming number, killing his men, not singly but by scores, as he rode on, untouched, and gay, and loyal to his trust. It is so that young love is apt to make its idol a knight miraculous, moving through a cloud-land too ethereal for the needs of each day as it comes. Nance Demaine could hold her own in the open country; but here, shut in by the walls of a house that was old and dumb, waiting for the men’s return, she reached out for Will Underwood’s help, and needed him--or needed the untried, easy air of romance that he carried with him. She got up from the window-seat at last. The sleet and the piping wind wearied her. She was tired already of inaction, ashamed of the thoughts that could not keep away from pictures of Will Underwood, riding on the Prince’s service. She remembered that she was a guest here, that she must get away from her dreams as best she might. “I must go down,” she said fretfully. “Lady Royd will be needing me. And she’ll take my hands, and cry a little, and ask me, ‘Will Sir Jasper live?’ And then she’ll kiss me, and cry again, and ask, ‘Will Sir Jasper die?’ Oh, I know it all beforehand! But I must go down.” Even now she could not bring herself to the effort. She paced up and down the floor of her bedchamber. Disdain of her position here, intemperate dislike of weaklings, the longing to be out and about under the free sky, were overwhelming in their call to this child who needed discipline. And, though she was Squire Demaine’s child, she resented this first, drab-coloured call of duty. She braced herself to the effort. But she was bitter still, and some remembrance of her father’s teaching took her unawares. “Lady Royd comes from the south country, where they killed a Royal Stuart once,” she muttered. “She does not know--she cannot even learn--our northern ways. Sir Jasper lives or dies--but either way he lives. She does not know that either way he _lives_--as we count life up here.” Nance was shaken by the passion known to women who have seen their men go out to war--the passion that finds no outlet in hard give-and-take--the desperate, keen heartache that is left to feed upon itself. “I must go down,” she said, as if repeating a lesson hard to learn.