Downstairs he found only a serving-maid, who was spreading the breakfast table with cold meats enough to feed twenty men of usual size and appetite. The mistress was in the herb-garden, she said, and the men folk all abroad. For a moment the messenger doubted his welcome last night. Had he dreamed of six score men ready for the King’s service, or was the Squire’s honesty, his frank promise to ride out, a pledge repented of already? He found the Squire’s wife walking in the herb-garden, and the face she lifted was tear-stained. "I give you good day," she said, "though you’ve not dealt very well with me and mine." "Is there a finer errand than the King’s?" he asked brusquely. "My heart, sir, is not concerned with glory and fine errands. It is very near to breaking. Without discourtesy, I ask you to leave me here in peace—for a little while—until my wounds are healing." The Squire and his sons had been abroad before daybreak, riding out across the wide lands of Nappa. Of the hundred odd grown men on their acres, there was not one—yeoman, or small farmer, or hind—but was a Metcalf by name and tradition. They were a clan of the old, tough Border sort, welded together by a loyalty inbred through many generations; and the law that each man’s horse must be of the true Metcalf white was not of yesterday. Christopher’s ride to call his kinsfolk in had taken him wide to the boundary of Sir Timothy Grant’s lands; and, as he trotted at the head of his growing company, he was bewildered to see Joan step from a little coppice on the right of the track. She had been thinking of him, as it happened, till sleep would not come; and, like himself, she needed to get out into the open. Very fresh she looked, as she stepped into the misty sunlight—alert, free-moving, bred by wind and rain and sun. To Kit she seemed something not of this world; and it is as well, maybe, that a boy’s love takes this shape, because in saner manhood the glamour of the old day-dreams returns, to keep life wholesome. Kit halted his company, heedless of their smiles and muttered jests, as he rode to her side. "You look very big, Christopher! You Nappa men—and your horses—are you riding to some hunt?" She was cold, provocative, dismaying. "Yes, to hunt the Roundheads over Skipton way. The King has sent for us." "But—the call is so sudden, and—I should not like to hear that you were dead, Kit." Her eyes were tender with him, and then again were mocking. He could make nothing her, as how should he, when older men than he had failed to understand the world’s prime mystery. "Joan, what did you mean by ’until,’ last night at the stile? You said none should master you until——" "Why, yes, _until_—— Go out and find the answer to that riddle." "Give me your kerchief," he said sharply—"for remembrance, Joan."