“Curse him!” he cried.  “And he dared lay a foul tongue to her, you say?  Tell me what he said!  I have a good right to know!”

I shook my head.  “Nay, Richard; I may not repeat it to you, since you are the man’s second.  Truly, there is more than this at the back of our quarrel; but of itself it was enough, and more than enough, inasmuch as the lady had just done him the honor to recognize him.”

“His words—­his very words, Jack, if you love me!”

“No; the quarrel is mine.”

“By God! it is not yours!” he stormed, raging back and forth before the fire.  “What is Margery Stair to you, Jack Ireton?”

I smiled, beginning now to see some peephole in this millstone of mystery.

“Margery Stair?  She is no more than a name to me, I do assure you; the daughter of the man who sits in my father’s seat at Appleby Hundred.”

“But you are going to fight for her!” he retorted.

“Am I?  I pledge you my word I did not know it.  But in any case I should fight Sir Francis Falconnet; aye, and do my best to kill him, too.  Sit you down and fill another pipe.  Whatever the quarrel, it is mine.”

“Mayhap; but it is mine, too,” he broke in, angrily.  “At all events, I’ll see this king’s volunteer well hanged before I second him in such a cause.”

“That as you choose.  But you are bound in honor, are you not?”

“No.”  He filled a fresh pipe, lighted it with a coal from the hearth, and puffed away in silence for a time.  When he spoke again it was not as Falconnet’s next friend.

“What you have told me puts a new face on the matter, Jack.  Sir Francis may find him another second where he can.  If he has aught to say, I shall tell him plain he lied to me about the quarrel, as he did.  Now who is there to see fair play on your side, John Ireton?”

At the question an overwhelming sense of my own sorry case grappled me.  Fifteen years before, I had left Appleby Hundred and my native province as well befriended as the son of Roger Ireton was sure to be.  And now—­

“Dick, my lad, I am like to fight alone,” said I.

He swore again at that; and here, lest I should draw my loyal Richard as he was not, let me say, once for all, that his oaths were but the outgushings of a warm and impulsive heart, rarely bitter, and never, as I believe, backed by surly rancor or conscious irreverence.

“That you shall not, Jack,” he asserted, stoutly.  “I must be a-gallop now to tell this king’s captain to look elsewhere for his next friend; but to-morrow morning I’ll meet you in the road between this and the Stair outlands, and we’ll fare on together.”

After this he would brook no more delay; and when Tomas had fetched his horse I saw him mount and ride away under the low-hanging maples—­watched him fairly out of sight in the green and gold twilight of the great forest before turning back to my lonely hearth and its somber reminders.