The Lady Sybilla laughed, as it seemed, heartily, yet with some little bitterness in the sound of it.

“I declare you Douglases stick together like crabs in a basket.  Cousins in France do not often love each other so well.  You are fortunate in your relations, my Lord Duke.”

“Indeed, and that I am,” cried the young man, joyously.  “Here be my cousins, William and James—­Will ever ready to read me out of wise books and advise me better than any clerk, Jamie aching to drive lance through any man’s midriff in my quarrel.”

“Lord, I would that I had the chance!” cried James.  “Saint Bride! but I would make a hole clean through him and out at the back, though my elbuck should dinnle for a week after.”

So talking together, but with the lady riding more silent and somewhat constrainedly in their midst, the three cousins of Douglas passed the drawbridge and came again to the precincts of the noble towers of Thrieve.

* * * * *

In an hour Sholto followed them, having ridden fast and furious across the long broomy braes of Boreland, and wet the fringes of his charger’s silken coverture by vaingloriously swimming the Dee at the castle pool instead of going round by the fords.  This he did in the hope that Maud Lindesay might see him.  And so she did; for as he came round by the outside of the moat, making his horse caracole and thinking no little of himself, he heard a voice from an upper window call out:  “Sholto MacKim, Maudie says that you look like a draggled crow.  No, I will not be silent.”

Then the words were shut off as if a hand had been set over the mouth which spoke.  But presently the voice out of the unseen came again:  “And I hate you, Sholto MacKim.  For we have had to keep in our chamber this livelong day, because of the two men you have placed over us, as if we had been prisoners in Black Archibald.[1] This very day I am going to ask my brother to hang Black Andro and John his brother on the dule tree of Carlinwark.”

[Footnote 1:  The pet name of the deepest dungeon of Castle Thrieve, yet extant and plain to be seen by all.]

“Yes, indeed, and most properly,” cried another voice, which made his very heart flutter, “and set his new captain of the guard a-dangle in the midst, decked out from head to foot in peacocks’ feathers.”

Sholto was very angry, for like a boy he took not chaffing lightly, and had neither the harshness of hide which can endure the rasping of a woman’s tongue, nor the quickness of speech to give her the counter retort.

So he cast the reins of his horse to a stable varlet and stamped indoors, carrying his master’s helmet to the armoury.  Then still without speech to any he brushed hastily up the stairs towards the upper floor, which he had set Andro the Penman and his brother to guard.

At the turning of the staircase David Douglas, the Earl’s brother, stopped him.  Sholto moved in salute and would have passed by.