Damn his nobility! There's another of them back yonder, as
much use as an old tup."
"If I detain you much longer," said I, with exaggerated sweetness,
"you'll be damning me."
"Nothing likelier. I damn everything and everybody that don't suit me.
That's why I'm captain at fifty instead of colonel at thirty. What of it?"
"Lord Brocton's nine miles off, and I'm not."
"Think I care? Damn you, too, and I'll fight you when we meet again. Like
a lark! Wish I'd time now. Good day, sir!"
He dug the rowels into his horse and was off. An earnest, choleric man
with his heart in his work, for which I liked him, even to his persistent
damning.
I put Sultan to the slope and he kept bravely at it till I eased him off
where the rise was steepest. My late encounter clearly meant that affairs
were ripening fast farther north, and it might also mean danger behind me
sooner than I had looked for. The blood danced in my veins at the prospect
of the adventures that awaited me. Ho, for life and work! Would it be long
before the blue eyes lanced me through and through again, as when I kissed
her hand among the trees by the roadside? I looked at the frosty sun and
judged that it was nigh on twenty-four hours since I had stood in the
porch and watched mother and Kate across the cobbles into the road
--twenty-four hours that had done more for me than the twenty-four years
that had gone before them, for they had given me a man's task, a man's
thoughts, the stirrings of a man's being, the beginning of a man's agony.
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