earthly beauty, I would not
see her again.'

'Nay, there I command you,' said the King; 'soon I shall have subjects
enough; but while I have but half a dozen, I cannot be disobeyed by them!
I bid you go to Middleham, and there I leave all to the sight.'

The King spoke gaily, and with such kind good-humour that Malcolm,
humiliated by the thought of the past, durst not make fresh
asseverations. James, in the supreme moment of the pure and innocent
romance of which he was the hero, looked on love like his own as the
highest crown of human life, and distrusted the efforts after the
superhuman which too often were mere simulation or imitation; but a
certain recollection of Henry's warnings withheld him from pressing the
matter, and he returned to his own joys and hopes, looking on the
struggles he expected with a strong man's exulting joy, and not even
counting the years of his captivity wasted, though they had taken away
his first youth.

'What should I have been,' he said, 'bred up in the tumults at home? What
could I have known better than Perth? Nay, had I been sent home when I
came to age, as a raw lad, how would one or other by fraud or force have
got the upper hand, so as I might never have won it back. No, I would
not have foregone one year of study--far less that campaign in France,
and the sight of Harry in war and in policy.'

James also took Malcolm to see the child king, his little master. This,
the third king of James's captivity, was now a fair creature of two years
old. He trotted to meet his visitor, calling him by a baby name for
brother, and stretching out his arms to be lifted up and fondled; for, as
Dame Alice Boteller, his _gouvernante_, muttered, he knew the King of
Scots better than he did his own mother.

A retinue had been already collected, and equipments prepared, so that
there was no delay in sending forth Malcolm and Patrick upon their
northward journey. At the nearest town they halted, sending forward a
messenger to announce their neighbourhood to the old Countess of
Salisbury and her grand-daughter Lady Montagu, and to request permission
to halt for 'Mothering Sunday' at the Castle.

In return a whole band of squires and retainers came forth, headed by the
knightly seneschal, to invite Lord Malcolm Stewart and his companion to
the Castle; whereupon Sir Patrick proceeded to don his gayest gown and
chaperon, and was greatly scandalized that Malcolm's preparation
consisted in putt