The Governor laughed gently as he watched Miss Bingham turn and race down the hill. "A rare plucked one, she," he muttered, "kin to Jael, I fancy, wife of Heber the Kenite." She passed close by him on her breathless run down hill and joined the women-folk below. And the next moment the red havoc of it began. The Roundheads saw their leader race forward, and followed in close order. Down the slope they poured, and every clump of gorse spat out at them with a red and murderous fire. Then the Knaresborough men were up and into them, and when their leader got back to Otley with the remnants of his men, he protested that "he’d fancied, like, they’d ta’en all the hornets’ nests i’ Yorkshire, but some few thrifty wasps were breeding still." "Why do you laugh?" said Lady Ingilby, when the Governor came down to tell her all was well. "Because luck is as skew-tempered as the jackass braying yonder. Have the Metcalfs had such frolic out at Skipton, think ye? And I was keen to ride with them—Miss Bingham, I owe you reparation. When I saw you move up the hill yonder, I cursed you for a woman." "That was unwise, sir. As well curse Elizabeth because she is a donkey, and yearns for absent friends; or the jack-snipe, because his flight is slanting; or any of us who are made as we are made." "We thought you light of heart, child, in the old days at Knaresborough. Yet none of us could have planned a neater ambush." "It was my old pastime, after all. How often you’ve chided me for luring men into folly. Oh, what wise and solemn discourses you have given me, sir, on the unwisdom of it!" "There was wisdom in it this time. But for the ambush, we could not have faced the odds." For the next hour she busied herself with bandaging the men’s hurts; then, with a restlessness that had been growing on her since the Metcalfs went, she climbed the hill again. Only Blake saw her go. Unrest had been his comrade, too, since he found himself sharing this odd gipsy life with the woman he asked least to meet on this side or the other of the grave. He followed with reluctance and a smile at his own folly. She was standing on the hill-crest, one hand shading her eyes, as if she looked for some one to arrive. "Does he come, Miss Bingham?" asked Blake. She turned with a fury that died away and left her helpless. There was derision, heart-ache, pity, in Blake’s mobile face. "Is all forgot, then, Mr. Blake? There was a time in Knaresborough, at the ferry-steps, when you thought kindly of me." "There was. I ask you for some explanation of the madness. To my shame, the memory came and weakened me years after—when I found myself in Oxford, to be precise, and heard the nightingales. Answer the riddle. How can a thing so slight and empty hinder a grown man?" "You are bitter, unforgiving."