d evil report, and reminded her that to endure it patiently was
treading in the steps of her Master. She was resolved, therefore, to
make no further struggle nor complaint, but to trust that her silence
and endurance would be accepted. She could pray for her sisters and
their safety, and she would endeavour to yield up even that last earthly
desire to be certified of their safety, and to see their bonnie faces
once more. So there she lay, a being formed by nature and intellect to
have been the inspiring helpmeet of some noble-hearted man, the stay of
a kingdom, the education of all around her in all that was beautiful and
refined, but cast away upon one of the most mean and selfish-hearted of
mankind, who only perceived her great qualities to hate and dread their
manifestation in a woman, to crush them by his contempt; and finally,
though he did not originate the cruel slander that broke her heart,
he envenomed it by his sneers, so as to deprive her of all power of
resistance.

The lot of Margaret of Scotland was as piteous as that of any of the
doomed house of Stewart. And there the Lady of Glenuskie and Annis
de Terreforte watched her sinking day by day, and still there were no
tidings of Jean and Eleanor from Nanci, no messenger from Sir Patrick to
tell where the search was directed.

CHAPTER 9. BALCHENBURG

'In these wylde deserts where she now abode
There dwelt a salvage nation, which did live
On stealth and spoil, and making nightly rade
Into their neighbours' borders.'--SPENSER.

A terrible legacy of the Hundred Years' War, which, indeed, was not yet
entirely ended by the Peace of Tours, was the existence of bands of men
trained to nothing but war and rapine, and devoid of any other means of
subsistence than freebooting on the peasantry or travellers, whence they
were known as routiers--highwaymen, and ecorcheurs--flayers. They were
a fearful scourge to France in the early part of the reign of Charles
VII., as, indeed, they had been at every interval of peace ever since
the battle of Creci, and they really made a state of warfare preferable
to the unhappy provinces, or at least to those where it was not actually
raging. In a few years more the Dauphin contrived to delude many of
them into an expedition, where he abandoned them and left them to be
massacred, after which he formed the rest into the nucleus of a standing
army; but at this time they were the terror of travelle