“Thrust and fear not,” said the Countess of Douglas the second time.

Sholto lunged out at the stone with all his might.  Fire flew from the smitten blue whinstone where the point, with all the weight of his young body behind it, impinged on the wall.  A tingling shock of acutest agony ran up the striker’s wrist to the shoulder blade.  The sword dropped ringing on the pavement, and Sholto’s arm fell numb and useless to his side.

“Lift the sword and look,” commanded the Lady Douglas.

Sholto did as he was bidden, with his left hand, and lo, the point which had bent like a hoop was sharp and straight as if just from the armourer’s.  “Can you strike with your left hand?” asked the lady.

“As with my right,” answered the son of Malise the Brawny.

There was a bar at a window in the wall bending outward in shape like the letter U.

“Then strike a cutting stroke with your left hand.”

Sholto took the sword.  It seemed to him short-sighted policy that in the hour of his departure on a perilous quest he should disable himself in both arms.  But Sholto MacKim was not the youth to question an order.  He lifted the sword in his left hand, and with a strong ungraceful motion struck with all his might.

At first he thought that he had missed altogether.  There was no tingling in his arm, no jar when the blade should have encountered the iron.  But the Countess was examining the centre of the hoop.

“I have missed,” said Sholto.

“Come hither and look,” she said, without turning round.

And when he looked, lo, the thick iron had been cut through almost without bending.  The sides of the break were fresh, bright, and true.

“Now look at the edge of your sword,” she said.

There was no slightest dint anywhere upon it, so that Sholto, armourer’s son as he was, turned about the blade to see if by any chance he could have smitten with the reverse.

Failing in this, he could only kneel to his lady and say, “This is a great gift—­I am not worthy.”

For in these times of peril jewels and lands were as nothing to the value of such a suit of armour, which kings and princes might well have made war to obtain.

The faintest disembodied ghost of a smile passed over the face of the Countess of Douglas.

“It is the best I can do with it now,” she said, “and at least no one of the Avondales shall ever possess it.”

After the Lady Douglas had armed the young knight and sped him upon his quest, Sholto departed over the bridge where the surly custodian still grumbled at his horse’s feet trampling his clean wooden flooring.  The young man rode a Spanish jennet of good stock, a plain beast to look upon, neither likely to attract attention nor yet to stir cupidity.

His father and Laurence were already on their way.  Sholto had arranged that whether they found any trace of the lost ones or no, they were all to meet on the third day at the little town of Kirkcudbright.  For Sholto, warned by the Lady Sybilla, even at this time had his idea, which, because of the very horror of it, he had as yet communicated to no one.