, 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.

Then, when again alone with the King, he began with the assertion, 'It is
utterly impossible, Sir;' and James smiled to see his poison working. Not
that he viewed it as poison. Monasticism was at a discount, and the
ranks of the religious orders were chiefly filled, the old Benedictine
and Augustinian founda