‘Eh! the fit is on you too, boy!’

‘What fit, Sir?’ Malcolm opened his eyes.

‘The pleasing madness.’

Malcolm uttered a cry like horror, and reddened crimson.  ’Sir!  Sir!  Sir!’ he stammered.

‘A well-known token of the disease is raving.’

‘Sir, Sir!  I implore you to speak of nothing so profane.’

‘I am not given to profanity,’ said James, endeavouring to look severe, but with laughter in his voice.  ’Methought you were not yet so sacred a personage.’

’Myself!  No; but that I—­I should dare to have such thoughts of—­oh, Sir!’ and Malcolm covered his face with his hands.  ’Oh, that you should have so mistaken me!’

‘I have not mistaken you,’ said James, fixing his keen eyes on him.

‘Oh, Sir!’ cried Malcolm, like one freshly stung, ’you have!  Never, never dreamt I of aught but worshipping as a living saint, as I would entreat St. Margaret or—­’

There was still the King’s steady look and the suppressed smile.  Malcolm broke off, and with a sudden agony wrung his hands together.  The King still smiled.  ‘Ay, Malcolm, it will not do; you are man, not monk.’

‘But why be so cruel as to make me vile in my own eyes?’ almost sobbed Malcolm.

‘Because,’ said the King, ’she is not a saint in heaven, nor a nun in a convent, but a free woman, to be won by the youth she has marked out.’

’Marked!  Oh, Sir, she only condescended because she knew my destination.’

‘That is well,’ said King James.  ‘Thus sparks kindle at unawares.’

Malcolm’s groan and murmur of ‘Never!’ made James almost laugh at the evidence that on one side at least the touch-wood was ready.

‘Oh, Sir,’ he sighed, ’why put the thought before me, to make me wretched!  Even were she for the world, she would never be for me.  I—­doited—­hirpling—­’

’Peace, silly lad; all that is past and gone.  You are quite another now, and a year or two of Harry’s school of chivalry will send you home a gallant knight and minstrel, such as no maiden will despise.’

The King went, and Malcolm fell into a silent state of musing.  He was entirely overpowered, both by the consciousness awakened within himself, by the doubt whether it were not a great sin, and by the strangeness that the King, hitherto his oracle, should infuse such a hope.  What King James deemed possible could never be so incredible, or even sacrilegious, as he deemed it.  Restless, ashamed, rent by a thousand conflicting feelings, Malcolm roamed up and down his chamber, writhed, tried to sit and think, then, finding his thoughts in a whirl, renewed his frantic pacings.  And when dire necessity brought him again into the ladies’ chamber, he was silent, blushing, ungainly, abstracted, and retreated into the farthest possible corner from the unconscious Esclairmonde.