’Ah!  Women wants mast-heading off and on, for ’em to have a bit of a look-out over life as it is.  They go stewing over books of adventure and drop into frights about awful man.  Take me, now; you had a no small admiration for my manly valour once, and you trusted yourself to me, and did you ever repent it?—­owning you’re not the young woman to tempt to t’ other way.’

‘You wouldn’t have found me talking to you here if I had.’

‘And here I’m left to defend an empty castle, am I?’

‘Don’t drink or you’ll have your paytron on you.  He’s good use there.’

‘I ask it, can I see my lady?’

’Drunk nor sober you won’t.  Serve a paytron, be a leper, you’ll find, with all honest folk.’

Ines shook out an execrating leg at the foul word.  ’Leper, you say?  You say that?  You say leper to me?’

’Strut your tallest, Kit Ines.  It’s the money rattles in your pocket says it.’

’It’s my reputation for decent treatment of a woman lets you say it, Madge Winch.’

’Stick to that as long as your paytron consents.  It’s the one thing you’ve got left.’

‘Benefit, you hussy, and mind you don’t pull too stiff.’

‘Be the woman and have the last word!’

His tongue was checked.  He swallowed the exceeding sourness of a retort undelivered, together with the feeling that she beat him in the wrangle by dint of her being an unreasonable wench.

Madge huffed away to fill her boxes.

He stood by the cart, hands deep down his pockets, when she descended.  She could have laughed at the spectacle of a champion prize-fighter out of employ, hulking idle, because he was dog to a paytron; but her contempt of him declined passing in small change.

‘So you’re off.  What am I to tell my lord when he comes?’ Kit growled.  ‘His yacht’s fetching for a Welsh seaport.’

She counted it a piece of information gained, and jumped to her seat, bidding the driver start.  To have pretty well lost her character for a hero changed into a patron’s dog, was a thought that outweighed the show of incivility.  Some little distance away, she reproached herself for not having been so civil as to inquire what day my lord was expected, by his appointment.  The girl reflected on the strangeness of a body of discontented miners bringing my lord and my lady close, perhaps to meet.

CHAPTER XXX

REBECCA WYTHAN

The earl was looked for at the, chief office of the mines, and each day an expectation of him closed in disappointment, leaving it to be surmised that there were more serious reasons for his continued absence during a crisis than any discussed; whether indeed, as when a timepiece neglects to strike the hour which is, by the reckoning of natural impatience, past, the capital charge of ‘crazy works’ must not be brought against a nobleman hitherto precise