‘One would have cancelled the other, as grammarians tell us,’ said Harry, ’if thy charms, John, had cancelled thine hook nose!  I would they had, ere her first marriage.  Humfrey will burn his fingers there, and we must hasten back to look after that among other things.—­My Lord Marmion,’ he added, starting hastily up, and calling to him as he stood at some distance conversing with the Scottish Nigel, ’so please you, let us have the horses;’ and as the gentleman hastened to give the summons, he said, ’We shall make good way now.  We shall come on Watling Street.  Ha, Jamie, when shall we prove ourselves better men than a pack of Pagan Romans, by having a set of roads fit for man or beast, of our own making instead of theirs half decayed?  Look where I will, in England or France, their roads are the same in build—­firm as the world itself, straight as arrows.  An army is off one’s mind when once one gets on a Roman way.  I’ll learn the trick, and have them from Edinburgh to Bordeaux ere ten years are out; and then, what with traffic and converse with the world, and ready justice, neither Highland men minor Gascons will have leisure or taste for robbery.’

‘Perhaps Gascons and Scots will have a voice in the matter,’ said James, a little stiffly; and the horses being by this time brought, Sir Harry mounted, and keeping his horse near that of young Malcolm, to whom he had evidently taken a fancy, he began to talk to him in so friendly and winning a manner, that he easily drew from the youth the whole history of his acquaintance with Sir James Stewart, of the rescue of his sister, and the promise to conduct him to the captive King of Scots, as the only means of saving him from his rapacious kindred.

‘Poor lad!’ said Harry, gravely.

‘Do you know King James, Sir?’ asked Malcolm, timidly.

‘Know him?’ said Harry, turning round to scan the boy with his merry blue eye.  ’I know him—­yes; that as far as a poor Welsh knight can know his Grace of Scotland.’

‘And, Sir, will he be good lord to me?’

’Eh! that’s as you may take him.  I would not be one of yonder Scots under his hands!’

‘Has he learned to hate his own countrymen?’ asked Malcolm, in an awe-stricken voice.

’Hate?  I trow he has little to love them for.  He is a good fellow enough, my young lord, when left to himself; but best beware.  Lions in a cage have strange tempers.’

A courier rode up at the moment, and presented some letters, which Sir Harry at once opened and read, beckoning his brother and Sir James to his side, while Malcolm rode on in their wake, in a state of dismay and bewilderment.  Nigel and Lord Marmion were together at so great an interval that he could not fall back on them, nor learn from them who these brothers were.  And there was something in the ironical suppressed pity with which Harry had spoken of his prospects with the King of Scots, that terrified him all the more, because he knew that Sir James and Nigel would both hold it unworthy of him to have spoken freely of his own sovereign with an Englishman.  Would James be another Walter? and, if so, would Sir James Stewart protect him?  He had acquired much affection for, and strong reliance on, the knight; but there was something unexplained, and his heart sank.