“It seems as if we never could again behold any one we loved or wished to see—­here in this horrible place,” sighed Maud Lindesay.  “If ever I get back to the dear land and see Solway side, I will be a different girl.”

“But, Maud,” said the little maid, reproachfully, “you were always good and kind.  It is not well done of you to speak against yourself in that fashion.”

Maud Lindesay shook her pretty head mournfully.

“Ah, Margaret, you will know some day,” she said.  “I have been wicked,—­not in things one has to confess to Father Gawain, but,—­well, in making people like me, and give me things, and come to see me, and then afterwards flouting them for it and sending them away.”

It was not a lucid description, but it sufficed.

“Ah, but,” said Margaret Douglas, “I think not these things to be wicked.  I hope that some day I shall do just the same, though, of course, I shall not be as beautiful as you, Maudie; no, never!  I asked Sholto MacKim if I would, and he said, ‘Of course not!’ in a deep voice.  It was not pretty of him, was it, Maud?”

“I think it was very prettily said of him,” answered Maud Lindesay, with the first flicker of a smile on her face.  Her conscience was quite at ease about Sholto.  He was different.  Whatever pain she had caused him, she meant to make up to him with usury thereto.  The others she had exercised no more for her own amusement than for their own souls’ good.

“My brother William must indeed be very angry with us, that he hath never sent to find us and bring us home,” went on the little girl.  “It is three months since we met that horrible old woman in the woods above Thrieve Island, and believed her when she told us that the Earl had instant need of us—­and that Sholto MacKim was with him.”

“None saw us taken away.  Margaret,” said the elder, “and perhaps, who knows, they may never have found any of the pieces of flower garlands I threw down before they put us in the boats from the beach of Cassencary.”

But the eyes of the little Maid of Galloway were now fixed upon something in the green courtyard below.

“Maud, Maud, come hither quickly!” she whispered; “if yonder be not Laurence MacKim talking to the singing lads and dressed like them—­why, then, I do not know Laurie MacKim!”

Maud came quickly now.  Her face and neck blushed suddenly crimson with the springing of hope in her heart.

She looked down, and there, far below them indeed, but yet distinct enough, they saw Laurence daring Blaise Renouf to single combat and vaunting his Irish prowess, as we have already seen him do.  Maud Lindesay caught her companion’s hand as she looked.

“They have found us,” she whispered; “at least, they are seeking for us.  If Laurence is here, I warrant Sholto cannot be very far away.  Oh, Margaret, am I looking very ill?  Will he think I am as—­(she paused for a word)—­as comely as he thought me before in Scotland?  Or have I grown old and ugly with being shut up so long?”