"In the doldrums, girl? I shall have to train you. It’s easier to laugh, than cry—that’s the true Royalist faith." Pansy—half maid, half confidante, and altogether spoiled—began to whimper. "It’s easy to laugh, with all the road in front of you, and a riding knight ahead. I’ve no man to think of, and that leaves a woman lonesome-like." "It is not for want of suitors," said Joan, humouring her maid as good mistresses do. "You had your choice of the dalesmen, Pansy." Pansy bridled a little and shifted her headgear to a more becoming angle. "Ay, but they’re rough." Her speech relapsed into the mother-tongue she had tried often to forget. "A lass that kens more doesn’t mate with the li’le bit less. She has her pride." The mistress did not answer, but fell into a long reverie. What was true of the maid was true of herself. Young Kit Metcalf, riding for the King, was just "the li’le bit less," somehow. She had a regard for him, half real and half fanciful; but he seemed shut off from her by some intangible difference that was not uncouthness, but something near to it. He was big and forthright, and shocked her daintiness. They went through the pleasant dale. In Wensley village they met a waggon coming home with corn, ingathered for the threshing. All down the valley men were reaping in the fields. The land yielded its produce, and folk were gathering it as if no blight of civil war had fallen about the land. This, too, disturbed Joan Grant. She had pictured her journey to Ripley as one long road of peril—a battle to every mile, and danger’s swift excitement scudding on before her. "There’s no war at all, Pansy," she said fretfully, watching mile after tranquil mile go by. "They gather in their corn, and the peace is undisturbed." "We should be thankful for the mercy," said the maid austerely. "Oh, we should, girl, but we’re not. Undoubtedly we are not thankful." At Skipton, the day before, there had been battle enough, as the Riding Metcalfs knew. When the fight was ended, and they had spiked the guns lying wide across the highway of the Raikes, they gathered for the forward ride. A hundred-and-twenty of them had ridden out, and not one was missing from their number, though half of them were carrying wounds. Old Metcalf—"Mecca," as his kinsfolk had the name—rounded up his company. "The Governor tells me, lads, that a company of Fairfax’s men are coming through. We’ve to go wide of Skipton and ambush them." Battle sat finely on the man. He had no doubts, no waywardness. He was here for the King, to take orders from those placed above him, and to enforce them so far as his own command went. "A Mecca for the King!" roared Christopher, the six-foot baby of the flock.