First, as an escort to the ambassador royal of France and Scotland who came behind, rode the Earl of Avondale and his five sons, noble young men, and most unlikely to have sprung from such a stock.  James the Gross rode a broad Clydesdale mare, a short, soft unwieldy man, sitting squat on the saddle like a toad astride a roof, and glancing slily sideways out of the pursy recesses of his eyes.

Behind him came his eldest son William, a man of a true Douglas countenance, quick, high, and stern.  Then followed James, whose lithe body and wonderful dexterity in arms were already winning him repute as one of the bravest knights in all Christendom in every military and manly exercise.

Behind the Avondale Douglases rode two men abreast, with a lady on a palfrey between them.

The first to take the eye, both by his stature and his remarkable appearance, rode upon a charger covered from head to tail in the gorgeous red-and-gold diamonded trappings pertaining to a marshal of France.  He was in complete armour, and wore his visor down.  A long blue feather floated from his helmet, falling almost upon the flank of his horse; a truncheon of gold and black was at his side.  A pace behind him the lilies of France were displayed, floating out languidly from a black and white banner staff held in the hands of a young squire.

The knight behind whom the banner royal of Scotland fluttered was a man of different mould.  His spare frame seemed buried in the suit of armour that he wore somewhat awkwardly.  His pale ascetic countenance looked more in place in a monkish cloister than on a knightly tilting ground, and he glanced this way and that with the swift and furtive suspicion of one who, while setting one trap, fears to be taken in another.

But the lady who rode on a white palfrey between these two took all men’s regard, even in the presence of a marshal of France and a herald extraordinary of the King of Scots.

The Earl Douglas, having let his eyes once rest upon her, could not again remove them, being, as it were, fixed by the very greatness of the wonder which he saw.

It was the lady of the pavilion underneath the pines, the lady of the evening light and of the midnight storm.

She was no longer clothed in simple white, but arrayed like a king’s daughter.  On her head was a high-peaked coiffure, from which there flowed down a graceful cloud of finest lace.  This, even as the Earl looked at her, she caught at with a bewitching gesture, and brought down over her shoulder with her gloved hand.  A close-fitting robe of palest blue outlined the perfections of her body.  A single fleur-de-lys in gold was embroidered on the breast of her white bodice, and the same device appeared again and again on the white housing of her palfrey.

She sat in the saddle, gently smiling, and looking down with a sweetness which was either the perfection of finished coquetry or the expression of the finest natural modesty.