But the elder woman answered neither her smile nor yet her word, but stood like a mother who sees a first-born son treading in places perilous, yet dares not warn him, knowing well that she would drive him to giddier and yet more dangerous heights.

The pennons of the escort fluttered in the breeze as the men on horseback tossed their lances high in the air, in salutation of their lord.  The archer guard stood ranked and ready, bows on their shoulders and arrows in quiver.  Horses neighed, armour clanked and sparkled, and from the moat platform twenty silver trumpets blared a fanfare as the Lady Sybilla, the arbiter of this day’s chivalry, mounted her palfrey with the help of Earl Douglas.  She thanked him with a low word in his ear, audible only to himself, as he set her in the saddle and bent to kiss her hand.

A right gallant pair were Douglas and Sybilla de Thouars as they rode away, their heads close together, over the green sward and under the tossing banners of the bridge.  Sholto was behind them giving great heed to the managing of his horse, and wondering in his heart if indeed Maud Lindesay were looking down from her chamber window.  As they passed the drawbridge he turned him about in his saddle, as it were, to see that his men rode all in good order.  A little jet of white fluttered quickly from the sparred wooden gallery which clung to the grey walls of Thrieve, just outside the highest story.  And the young man’s heart told him that this was the atonement of Mistress Maud Lindesay.

Earl Douglas was in his gayest humour on this second day of the great tourneying.  He had got rid of his most troublesome guests.  His uncle James of Avondale, his red cousin of Angus, the grave ill-assorted figure of the Abbot of Dulce Cor, had all vanished.  Only the young and chivalrous remained,—­his cousins, William and James, Hugh and Archibald, good lances all and excellent fellows to boot.  It was also a most noble chance that the French ambassador was confined by the quinsy, for it was certainly pleasant to ride out alone with that beauteous head glancing so near his shoulder, to watch at will the sun crimsoning yet more the red lips, sparkling in the eyes that were bright as sunshine slanting through green leaves on a water-break, and to mark as he fell a pace behind how every hair of that luxuriant coif rippled golden and separate, like a halo of Florentine work about the head of a saint.

The Lady Sybilla de Thouars was merry also, but with what a different mirth to that of Mistress Maud Lindesay—­at least so thought Captain Sholto MacKim, with a conscious glow of pride in his own Scottish sweetheart.

True, Sholto was scarce a fair judge in that he loved one and did not love the other.  He owned to himself in a moment of unusual candour that there might be something in that.  But when the gay tones of the lady’s laughter floated back on the air, as his master and she rode forward by the edge of Dee towards the Lochar Fords, the first fear with which he had looked upon her in the greenwood returned upon the captain of the guard.