* * * * *

The instant Lord William entered his own castle of Thrieve over the drawbridge, and without even returning the salutations of his guard, he turned about to the two men who had so masterfully compelled his return.

“Ho, guard, there!” he cried, “seize me this instant the Abbot of the New Abbey and Malise MacKim.”

And so much surprised but wholly obedient, twenty archers of the Earl’s guard, commanded by old John of Abernethy, called Landless Jock, fell in at back and front.

Malise, the master armourer, stood silent, taking the matter with his usual phlegm, but the Abbot was voluble.

“William,” he said, holding out his hands with an appealing gesture, “I have laboured with you, striven with, prayed for you.  To-night I came forth through the storm, though an old man, to deliver you from the manifest snares of the devil—­”

But the Earl interrupted his recital without compunction.

“Set Malise MacKim in the inner dungeon,” he cried.  “Thrust his feet into the great stocks, and let my lord Abbot be warded safely in the castle chapel.  He is little likely to be disturbed there at his devotions.”

“Aye, my lord, it shall be done!” said Landless Jock, shaking his head, however, with gloomy foreboding, as the haughty young Earl in his wet and torn disarray flashed past him without further notice of the two men whom the might of his bare word had committed to prison.  The Earl sprang up the narrow turret stairs, passing as he did so through the vaulted hall of the men-at-arms, where more than a hundred stout archers and spearmen sat carousing and singing, even at that advanced hour of the night, while as many more lay about the corridors or on the wooden shelves which they used for sleeping upon, and which folded back against the wall during the day.  At the first glimpse of their young master, every man left awake among them struggled to his feet, and stood stiffly propped, drunk or sober according to his condition, with his eyes turned towards the door which gave upon the turnpike stair.  But with a slight wave of his hand the Earl passed on to his own apartment.

Here he found his faithful body-servant, Rene le Blesois, stretched across the threshold.  The staunch Frenchman rose mechanically at the noise of his master’s footsteps, and, though still soundly asleep, stood with the latch of the door in his hand, and the other held stiffly to his brow in salutation.

Left to his own devices, Lord William Douglas would doubtless have cast himself, wet as he was, upon his bed had not Le Blesois, observing his lord’s plight even in his own sleep-dulled condition, entered the chamber after his master and, without question or speech, silently begun to relieve him of his wet hunting dress.  A loose chamber gown of rich red cloth, lined with silk and furred with “cristy” grey, hung over the back of an oaken chair, and into this the young Earl flung himself in black and sullen anger.