“But you will not take my little David with you?  You will leave me one son here to comfort me in my loneliness and old age?”

The Earl seemed about to yield, being, indeed, careless whether David went with him or no.

“Mother,” cried David, coming running forth from the castle, “you must not persuade William to make me stay at home.  I shall never be a man if I am kept among women.  There is Sholto MacKim, he is little older than I, and already he hath won the archery prize and the sword-play, and hath fought in a tourney and been knighted—­while I have done nothing except pull gowans with Maud Lindesay and play chuckie stones with Margaret there.”

And at that moment Sholto wished that this fate had been his, and the honours David’s.  He told himself that he would willingly have given up his very knighthood that he might abide near that dainty form and witching face.  He tortured himself with the thought that Maud would listen to others as she had listened to him; that she would practise on others that heart-breaking slow droop and quick uplift of the eyelashes which he knew so well.  Who might not be at hand to aid her to blow out her lamp when the guards were set of new in the corridors of Thrieve?

“Mother,” the Earl answered, “David speaks good sense.  He will never make a man or a Douglas if he is to bide here within this warded isle.  He must venture forth into the world of men and women, and taste a man’s pleasures and chance a man’s dangers like the rest.”

“But are you certain that you will bring him safe back again to me?” said his mother, wistfully.  “Remember, he is so young and eke so reckless.”

“Nay,” cried David, eagerly, “I am no younger than my cousin James was when he fought the strongest man in Scotland, and I warrant I could ride a course as well as Hughie Douglas of Avondale, though William chose him for the tourney and left me to bite my thumbs at home.”

The lady sighed and looked at her sons, one of them but a youth and the other no more than a boy.

“Was there ever a Douglas yet who would take any advice but from his own desire?” she said, looking down at them like a douce barn-door fowl who by chance has reared a pair of eaglets.  “Lads, ye are over strong for your mother.  But I will not sleep nor eat aright till I have my David back again, and can see him riding his horse homeward through the ford.”

CHAPTER XXVIII

ON THE CASTLE ROOF

Maud Lindesay parted from Sholto upon the roof of the keep.  She had gone up thither to watch the cavalcade ride off where none could spy upon her, and Sholto, noting the flutter of white by the battlements, ran up thither also, pretending that he had forgotten something, though he was indeed fully armed and ready to mount and ride.

Maud Lindesay was leaning over the battlements of the castle, and, hearing a step behind her, she looked about with a start of apparent surprise.