“Now who is fierce?” she cried.  And then, like lightning:  “Will you raise a band of rebels and come and take your own again?”

“You know I will not,” I protested, so gravely that she laughed again, though now there were tears, from what well-spring of emotion I knew not, in her eyes.

“Oh, mercy me!  Have you never one little grain of imagination, Monsieur John?  You are too monstrous literal for our poor jesting age.”  Then she sobered quickly and added this:  “And yet I fear that this is what my father fears.”

I did not tell her that he might have feared it once with reason, or that now the houseless dog she petted should have life of me though mine enemy should sick him on.  But I did say her father had no present cause to dread me.

“He thinks he has.  And surely there is cause enough,” she added.

I smiled, and, loving her the more for her fairness, must smile again.

“Nay, you have changed all that, dear lady.  Truly, I did at first fly out at him and all concerned for what has made me a poor pensioner in my father’s house—­or rather in the house that was my father’s.  But that was while the hurt was new.  I have been a soldier of fortune too long to think overmuch of the loss of Appleby Hundred.  ’Twas my father’s, certainly; but ’twas never mine.”

“And yet—­and yet it should be yours, John Ireton.”  She said it bravely, with uplifted face and eloquent eyes that one who ran might read.

“’Tis good and true of you to say so, little one; but there be two sides to that, as well.  So my father’s acres come at last to you and Richard Jennifer, I shall be well content, I do assure you, Margery.”

She sprang up from her low seat and went to stand in the window-bay.  After a time she turned and faced me once again, and the warm blood was in cheek and neck, and there was a soft light in her eyes to make them shine like stars.

“Then you would have me marry Richard Jennifer?” she asked.

’Twas but a little word that honor bade me say, and yet it choked me and I could not say it.

“Dick would have you, Margery; and Dick is my dear friend—­as I am his.”

“But you?” she queried.  “Were you my friend, as well, is this as you would have it?”

My look went past her through the lead-rimmed window-panes to the great oaks and hickories on the lawn; to these and to the white road winding in and out among them.  While yet I sought for words in which to give her unreservedly to my dear lad, two horsemen trotted into view.  One of them was a king’s man; the other a civilian in sober black.  The redcoat rode as English troopers do, with a firm seat, as if the man were master of his mount; but the smaller man in black seemed little to the manner born, and daylight shuttled in and out beneath him, keeping time to the jog-trot of his beast.

I thought it passing strange that with all good will to answer her, these coming horsemen seemed to hold me silent.  And, indeed, I did not speak until they came so near that I could make them out.