iated the
savour of the jest. Then he looked away, turning the enjoyment over
and over under his own tongue, and muttering: "Ah, well, 'tis not his
fault. No man hath a sense of humour before he is forty years of his
age--and, for that matter, 'tis all the riper at fifty."

The young man's eyes were looking this way and that, up and down the
smooth pathway which skirted like a green selvage the shores of the
loch.

"Malise," he said, as if he had already forgotten his late eager quest
for the little Magdalen, "Darnaway here has a shoe loose, and
to-morrow I ride to levy, and may also joust a bout in the tilt-yard
of the afternoon. I would not ask you to work in Whitsuntide, but that
there cometh my Lord Fleming and Alan Lauder of the Bass, bringing
with them an embassy from France--and I hear there may be fair ladies
in their company."

"Ah!" quoth Malise, grimly, "so I have heard it said concerning the
embassies of Charles, King of France!"

But the young man only smiled, and dusted off one or two flecks of
foam which had blown backwards from his horse's bit upon the rich
crimson doublet of finest velvet, which, cinctured closely at the
waist, fell half-way to his knees in heavy double pleats sewn with
gold. A hunting horn of black and gold was suspended about his neck by
a bandolier of dark leather, subtiley embroidered with bosses of gold.
Laced boots of soft black hide, drawn together on the outside from
ankle to mid-calf with a golden cord, met the scarlet "chausses" which
covered his thighs and outlined the figure of him who was the noblest
youth and the most gallant in all the realm of Scotland.

Earl William wore no sword. Only a little gold-handled poignard with a
lady's finger ring set upon the point of the hilt was at his side, and
he stood resting easily his hand upon it as he talked, drawing it an
inch from its sheath and snicking it back again nonchalantly, with a
sound like the clicking of a well-oiled lock.

"Clink the strokes strongly and featly, Malise, for to-morrow, when the
Black Douglas rides upon Black Darnaway under the eyes of--well--of
the ladies whom the ambassadors are bringing to greet me, there must
be no stumbling and no mistakes. Or on the head of Malise MacKim the
matter shall be, and let that wight remember that the Douglas does not
keep a dule tree up there by the Gallows Slock for nothing."

The mighty smith was by this time examining the hoofs of the Earl's
charger one by on