"Why, you think more of the Cause than Mark does, I believe!" I put
in.

"Not more than Mark--not more than Mark! Jack, you mustn't say that:
you mustn't think it!"

"And a great deal more of our name," I went on sturdily, disregarding
her tone, which I considered vehement beyond reason. "'Tis a strange
thing to me, Margery, that of us three you should be the one to think
everything of the name of Lantine, who are a girl and must take
another when you marry."

She halted and turned on me with more anger than I had ever seen on
her face. She even stamped her foot. "Never!" she said, and again
"Never!"

"Oh, well--" I began; but she had started walking rapidly, and
although I caught her up, not another word would she say to me until
we reached home.

For a year we saw no more of our brother, and received of him only two
letters (for he hated penwork), the both very cheerful. Yet within
a month of his going, on a still clear day in January, we listened
together to the noise of a pitched battle in which he was fighting, a
short six miles from us as the crow flies. I have often admired how
men who were happily born too late to witness the troubles of those
times will make their own pictures of warfare, as though it changed at
once the whole face of the country and tenour of folk's lives; whereas
it would be raging two valleys away and men upon their own farms
ploughing to the tune of it, with nothing seen by them then or
afterwards; or it would leap suddenly across the hills, filling the
roads with cursing weary men, and roll by, leaving a sharp track of
ruin for the eye to follow and remember it by. So on this afternoon,
when Hopton and the Cornish troops were engaging and defeating Ruthen
on Braddock Down, Margery and I counted the rattles of musketry borne
down to us on the still reaches of the river and, climbing to the
earthwork past the field where old Will Retallack stuck to his
ploughing with an army of gulls following and wheeling about him as
usual, spied the smoke rolling over the edge of Boconnoc woodland to
the north-east; but never a soldier we saw that day or for months
after.

A little before the end of the day the rebel army broke and began to
roll back through Liskeard and towards the passes of the Tamar, and
Mark followed with his troops to Saltash, into Devonshire, and as far
as Chagford, where he rode by Mr. Sydney Godolphin in the skirmish
which gave that valiant young gentleman his mortal wo