Here the darkness stood our friend; and when the redcoat troopers came down to the river’s edge with torches to see what had become of us, we took advantage of the noise they made and stole away up-stream till a shelving beach gave us leave to climb to the valley level above.

Richard shook himself like a water-soaked spaniel and laughed grimly.

“Well, here we are, safe across, horseless, and well belike to freeze to death,” he commented.  “What next?”

I made him a bow.  “You are on my demesne of Appleby Hundred, Captain Jennifer, and it shall go hard with us if we can not find a fire to warm a guest and a horse to mount him withal.  Let us go to the manor house and see what we can discover.”

He entered at once into the spirit of the jest, and together we trudged the scant mile through the stubble-fields to my old roof-tree.  As you would guess, we looked to find the manor house turned into an outpost headquarters; but now we were desperate enough to face anything.

Howbeit, not to rush blindly into the jaws of a trap, we first routed out the old black majordomo at the negro quarters; and when we learned from him that the great house was quite deserted, we took possession and had the black make us a rousing fire in the kitchen-arch.  Nay, more; when we had steamed ourselves a little dry, we had old Anthony stew and grill for us, and fetch us a bottle of that madeira of my father’s laying in.

“A toast!” cried Richard, when the bottle came, springing to his feet with the glass held high.  “To the dear lady of Appleby Hundred, and may she forgather with the man she loves best, be it you, or I, or another, Jack Ireton!”

We drank it standing; and after would sit before the fire, havering like two love-sick school-boys over the charms of that dear lady to whom one of us was less than naught, and to whom the other could be but naught whilst that first one lived.

You will smile, my dears, that we should come to this when, but a short hour before, one of us had been bent upon slaying the other for Mistress Margery’s sake.  But the human heart is many-sided; notably that heart the soldier carries.  And though I looked not to live beyond the setting of another sun, I was glad to my finger-tips to have this last loving-cup with my dear lad.  I thought it would nerve me bravely for what must come—­and so it did, though not as I prefigured.

We were still sitting thus before the kitchen-arch when the dawn began to dim the firelight, and the work of the new day confronted us.  Pinned down, old Anthony confessed that some two or three horses of the Appleby Hundred stables had escaped the hands of the foragers of both sides; and two of these he fetched for us.  Of the twain one chanced to be Blackstar, the good beast which had carried me from New Berne in the spring; and so I had my own horse betwixt my knees when I set Dick a mile on the road to Salisbury, and bade him farewell.