is no fair cruel maid to bind his heart in chains, and
make him fetch and carry to break his pride. He thinks overmuch of his
sword-play and arrow skill."

"He must go to France for that humbling," said the Earl, gaily, "or
else mayhap some day a maid may come from France to break his heart
for him. The like hath been and may be again."

"I would that I had known there were such gallant blades as you three,
my Lords of Douglas and their knight, sighing here in Scotland to have
your hearts broke for the good of your souls. I had then brought with
me a tierce of damsels fair as cruel, who had done it in the flashing
of a swallow's wing. But 'tis a contract too great for one poor maid."

"Yet you yourself ventured all alone into this realm of forlorn and
desperate men," answered the Earl, scarcely recking what he said, nor
indeed caring so that her dark eyes should continue to rest on him
with the look he had seen in them at his first coming.

"All alone--yes, much, much alone," she answered with a strange
glance about her. "My kinsman loves not womankind, and neither in his
castles nor yet in his company does he permit any of the sex long to
abide."

The men now mounted again, and the three rode back in the midst of the
cavalcade of Douglas spears, the Chancellor talking as freely and
confidently to the Earl as if he had been his friend for years, while
the Earl of Douglas kept up the converse right willingly so long as,
looking past the Chancellor, his eyes could rest also upon the
delicately poised head and graceful form of the Lady Sybilla.

And behind them a horse's length the Marshal de Retz rode, smiling in
the depths of his blue-black beard, and looking at them out of the
wicks of his triangular eyes.

Presently the towers of the Castle of Crichton rose before them on its
green jutting spur. The Tyne Valley sank beneath into level meads and
rich pastures, while behind the Moorfoots spread brown and bare
without prominent peaks or distinguished glens, but nevertheless with
a certain large vagueness and solemnity peculiarly their own.

The _fetes_ with which the Chancellor welcomed his guests were many
and splendid. But in one respect they differed from those which have
been described at Castle Thrieve. There was no military pomp of any
kind connected with them. The Chancellor studiously avoided all
pretence of any other distinction than that belonging to a plain man
whom circumstances have raised against hi