a strange and varied company which rode home to Thrieve to
receive the hospitality of the young Earl of Douglas and Duke of
Touraine. The castle itself, being no more than a military fortress,
containing in addition to the soldiers' quarters only the apartments
designed for the family (and scant enough even of those) could not, of
course, accommodate so great a company.

But as was the custom at all great houses, though more in England and
France than in poverty-stricken Scotland, the Earl of Douglas had in
store an abundant supply of tents, some of them woven of arras and
ornamented with cloth of gold, others of humbler but equally
serviceable material.

His mother, the Countess of Douglas, who knew nothing of the
occurrences of the night of the great storm, nor guessed at the
suspicions of witchcraft and diablerie which made a hell of the breast
of Malise, the master armourer, received her son's guests with
distinguished courtesy. Malise himself had gone to find the Abbot, so
soon as ever he set eyes on the companion of the Marshal de Retz, that
they might consult together--only, however, to discover that the
gentle churchman had quitted the field immediately after he had
obtained the consent of his nephew to the possession of the new
chorister, to whom he had taken so sudden and violent a fancy.

The hoofs of the whole cavalcade were erelong sounding hollow and dull
upon the wooden bridge, which the Earl's father had erected from the
left bank to the southernmost corner of the Isle of Thrieve, a bridge
which a single charge of powder, or even a few strokes of a wood-man's
axe, had been sufficient to remove and disable, but which nevertheless
enabled the castle-dwellers to avoid the extreme inconvenience of
passing through the ford at all states of the river.

Sholto MacKim, throwing all the consciousness of a shining success
into the stiffness of the neck which upheld the slight additional
weight of the Earl's gold buckle in his cap, found himself, not wholly
by accident, in the neighbourhood of his heart's beloved, Maud
Lindesay. For, like a valiant seneschal, she had kept her place all
day close beside the Fair Maid of Galloway.

And now the little girl was more than ever eager to keep near to her
friend, for the ambassador of the King of France had bent one look
upon her, so strange and searching that Margaret, though not naturally
timid, had cried aloud involuntarily and clasped her friend's hand
with a gra