to the
chamber door of the Lady of Douglas to ask her leave to depart.

At the first knock he heard a foot come slowly across the floor. It
was my lady, who opened the latch herself and stood before Sholto in
the habit she had worn when at the castle gateway Malise had told his
news. Her couch was unpressed. Her window stood open towards the
south. A candle still glimmered upon a little altar in an angle of the
wall. She had been kneeling all night before the image of the Virgin,
with her lips upon the feet of her who also was a woman, and who by
treachery had lost a son.

"I would have your permission to depart, my Lady Countess," said
Sholto, bowing his head upon his breast that he might not intrude upon
her eyes of grief; "the castle is safe, and I can be well spared. By
God's grace I shall not return till I bring either the maids
themselves or settled news of them. Have I your leave to go?"

The Lady of Douglas looked at him a moment without speech.

"Surely you are not the same who rode away behind my son William. You
went out light and gay as David, my other young son. There is now a
look of Earl William himself in your face--his mother tells you so.
Well, you were suckled at the same breast as he. May a double portion
of his spirit rest on you! That lowering regard is the Douglas mark.
Follow on and turn not back till you find. Strike and cease not, till
all be avenged. I have now no son left to save or to strike. Go,
Sholto MacKim. He who is dead loved you and made you knight. I said at
the time that you were too young and would have dissuaded him. But
when did a Douglas listen to woman's advice--his mother's or his
wife's? Foster brother you are--brother you shall be. By this kiss I
make you even as my son."

She bent and laid her lips on the young man's brow. They were hot as
iron uncooled from the smithy anvil.

"Come with me," she added, and with a vehemence strangely at odds with
her calm of the night before, she took Sholto by the hand and drew him
after her into the room that had been Earl William's.

From the bundle of keys at her side she took a small one of French
design. With this she unlocked a tall cabinet which stood in a corner.
She threw the folding doors open, and there in the recess hung a
wonderful suit of armour, of the sort called at that time "secret."

"This," said the Lady of Douglas, "I had designed for my son. Ten
years was it in the making. His father trysted it from a cunning