It was a strange and varied company which rode home to Thrieve to receive the hospitality of the young Earl of Douglas and Duke of Touraine.  The castle itself, being no more than a military fortress, containing in addition to the soldiers’ quarters only the apartments designed for the family (and scant enough even of those) could not, of course, accommodate so great a company.

But as was the custom at all great houses, though more in England and France than in poverty-stricken Scotland, the Earl of Douglas had in store an abundant supply of tents, some of them woven of arras and ornamented with cloth of gold, others of humbler but equally serviceable material.

His mother, the Countess of Douglas, who knew nothing of the occurrences of the night of the great storm, nor guessed at the suspicions of witchcraft and diablerie which made a hell of the breast of Malise, the master armourer, received her son’s guests with distinguished courtesy.  Malise himself had gone to find the Abbot, so soon as ever he set eyes on the companion of the Marshal de Retz, that they might consult together—­only, however, to discover that the gentle churchman had quitted the field immediately after he had obtained the consent of his nephew to the possession of the new chorister, to whom he had taken so sudden and violent a fancy.

The hoofs of the whole cavalcade were erelong sounding hollow and dull upon the wooden bridge, which the Earl’s father had erected from the left bank to the southernmost corner of the Isle of Thrieve, a bridge which a single charge of powder, or even a few strokes of a wood-man’s axe, had been sufficient to remove and disable, but which nevertheless enabled the castle-dwellers to avoid the extreme inconvenience of passing through the ford at all states of the river.

Sholto MacKim, throwing all the consciousness of a shining success into the stiffness of the neck which upheld the slight additional weight of the Earl’s gold buckle in his cap, found himself, not wholly by accident, in the neighbourhood of his heart’s beloved, Maud Lindesay.  For, like a valiant seneschal, she had kept her place all day close beside the Fair Maid of Galloway.

And now the little girl was more than ever eager to keep near to her friend, for the ambassador of the King of France had bent one look upon her, so strange and searching that Margaret, though not naturally timid, had cried aloud involuntarily and clasped her friend’s hand with a grasp which she refused to loosen, till Sholto had promised to walk by the side of her pony and allow her to net her trembling fingers into the thick of his clustering curls.

For the armourer’s son was, in those simple days, an ancient ally and playmate of the little noble damsel, and he dreamed, and not without some excuse, that in an age when every man’s strong arm and brave heart constituted his fortune, the time might come when he might even himself to Maud Lindesay, baron’s daughter though she were.  For both his father and himself were already high in favour with their master the Earl, who could create knighthoods and dispose lordships as easily as (and much more effectually and finally than) the King himself.