And then the King laughed, suddenly, infectiously; and his Queen was glad, for she knew that he, too, had had too little recreation of this sort. They went apart, these two, like any usual couple who were mated happily and had no secrets from each other. "How they bring the clean breath of the country to one," said Charles. "Before they came, it seemed so sure that Rupert was all they said of him." "It was I who made you credit rumours," she broke in, pretty and desolate in the midst of her French contrition. "I was so weary, and gossip laid siege to me hour by hour, and I yielded. And all the while I knew it false. I tell you, I love the sound of Rupert’s step. He treads so firmly, and holds his head so high." The King touched her on the arm with a deference and a friendship that in themselves were praise of this good wife of his. Then he went to the writing-table, wrote and sealed a letter, and put it into Michael’s hands. "Go, find the Prince," he said, "and give him this. He is to be found at this hour, I believe, in the tennis-court. And when you next see the Squire of Nappa tell him the King knows what the Riding Metcalfs venture for the cause." Seeing Kit hesitate and glance at him with boyish candour, the King asked if he had some favour to request. And the lad explained that he wished only to understand how it came that the Riding Metcalfs were so well known to His Majesty. "We have done so little," he finished; "and the north lies so far away." The King paced up and down the room. The fresh air these men had brought into the confinement of his days at Oxford seemed again to put restlessness, the need of hard gallops, into his soul. "No land lies far away," he said sharply, "that breeds honest men, with arms to strike shrewd blows. Did you fancy that a company of horsemen could light the north with battle, could put superstitious terror into the hearts of malcontents, and not be known? Gentlemen, are you so simple that you think we do not know what you did at Otley Bridge—at Ripley, when the moon shone on the greening corn—at Bingley, where you slew them in the moorland wood? It is not only ill news that travels fast, and the Prince, my nephew, never lets me rest for talk of you." To their credit, the Metcalfs bore it well. Bewildered by this royal knowledge of their deeds, ashamed and diffident because they had done so little in the north, save ride at constant hazard, they let no sign escape them that their hearts were beating fast. The King asked too much of himself and others, maybe, stood head and shoulders above the barter and cold common sense of everyday. The Metcalf spirit was his own, and through the dust and strife he talked with them, as if he met friends in a garden where no eavesdroppers were busy. They went out by and by, the Queen insisting, with her gay, French laugh, that the donkey should be presented to her later on. They found themselves in the street, with its pageantry of busy folk.