edded to a lass with a good tocher, and fit to guide your
silly pate. What's that? Her vows! If they are no better than yours,
the sooner they are forgot the better. If she had another love, 'twould
be another matter, but with a bishop on your side, you've naught to
fear.'

Malcolm turned away, sick at heart. To him his present position had
become absolute terror. His own words had worked him up to an alarming
sense of having lapsed from high aims to mere selfishness; of having
profaned vows, consented to violence, and fallen away from grace; and he
was in an almost feverish passion to utter something that would
irrevocably bind him to his former intentions; but here were the King and
Patrick both conspiring to silence him, and hold him back to his fallen
and perilous state. Nay, Patrick even derided his penitence. Patrick
was an honourable knight, a religious man, as times went, but he had been
brought up in a much rougher and more unscrupulous school than Malcolm,
and had been hardened by years of service as a soldier of fortune. The
Armagnac camp was not like that of England. Warriors of such piety and
strictness as Henry and Bedford had never come within his ken; and that
any man, professing to be a soldier, should hesitate at the license of
war, was incomprehensible to him. The discipline of Henry's army had
been scoffed at in the French camp, and every infraction of it hailed as
a token of hypocrisy; and to the stout Scot Malcolm's grief for the
rapine at Meaux, which after all he had not committed, seemed a simple
absurdity. Even his own danger, on the second occasion, did not make him
alter his opinion; it was all the fortune of war. And he was not sure
that he had not best have been stifled at once, since his hands were tied
from warfare. And as for Lily--how was he to win her now? Then, as
Malcolm opened his mouth, Patrick sharply charged him to hold his tongue
as to that folly, unless he wanted to drive him to make a vow on his
side, that he would turn Knight of Rhodes, and never wed.

Malcolm, wearied out with excitement, came at last to weeping that no one
would hear or understand him; but the scene was ended by Bairdsbrae, who,
returning, brought a leech with him, who at once took the command of
Patrick, and ordered him to his bed.

Malcolm could not rest. He was feverish with the shock of grief and awe,
and absorbed in the thought which had mastered him, and which was much
dwelt on in th