e proud young
captain of the Earl's guard, was dead with all his vanity. And in his
place a man rode southward grim and determined, with vengeful angers
a-smoulder in his bosom,--hunger, thirst, love, the joy of living and
the fear of death all being swallowed up by deadly hatred of those who
had betrayed his master.

Maud Lindesay was doubtless within a few miles of Sholto, yet he
scarcely gave even his sweetheart a thought as he urged his weary grey
over the purple Parton moors towards the loch of Carlinwark and the
little hamlet nestling along its western side under the ancient thorn
trees of the Carlin's hill.

He rode down over the green and empty Crossmichael braes on which the
broom pods were crackling in the afternoon sunshine, through hollows
where the corn lingered as though unwilling to have done with such a
scene of beauty, and find itself mewed in dusty barns, ground in
mills, or close pressed in thatched rick. He breasted the long smooth
rise and entered the woods which encircle the bright lakelet of
Carlinwark, the pearl of all southland Scottish lochs.

With a strange sense of detachment he looked down upon the green sward
between him and his mother's gable end, upon which as a child he had
wandered from dawn to dusk. Then it was nearly as large as the world,
and the grass was most comfortable to bare feet. There were children
playing upon it now, even as there had been of old, among them his own
little sister Magdalen, whose hair was spun gold, and her eyes blue as
the forget-me-not on the marshes of the Isle Wood. The children were
dressed in white, five little girls in all, as for a festal day, and
their voices came upward to Sholto's ear through the arches of the
great beeches which studded the turf with pavilions of green shade,
tenderly as they had done to that of William Douglas in the
spring-time of the year.

The minor note, the dying fall of the innocent voices, tugged at his
heartstrings. He could hear little Magdalen leading the chorus:

_"Margaret Douglas, fresh and fair,
A bunch of roses she shall wear,
Gold and silver by her side,
I know who's her bride."_

It was at "Fair Maid" they were playing, the mystic dance of Southland
maidenhood, at whose vestal rites no male of any age was ever
permitted to be present. The words broke in upon the gloom which
oppressed Sholto's heart. Momentarily he forgot his master and saw
Maud Lindesay with the little Margaret