bbess.

'The King!' cried Malcolm, 'we come from the King! Oh, what treachery
has been here?'

'And you, Lord Malcolm--and you, my kinsman, Sir Patrick of the Braes,
how do I see you here? We had heard you both were dead.'

'You heard a lying tale then, good Mother,' said Patrick, gruffly, 'no
doubt devised for the misery of the--of my--' He could not finish the
sentence, and Malcolm entreated the Abbess to tell the whole.

It appeared that about a year previously the chaplain of the monastery
had learnt at Coldingham that Sir John Swinton of Swinton had sent home
tidings that Patrick Drummond had been thrown from his horse and left
behind in a village which the English had harried, and as he could not
move, he was sure to have been either burnt or hung. This conclusion was
natural, and argued no malice in the reporter; and while poor Lilias was
still in her first agony of grief, Prior Drax sent over intelligence
derived from the Duke of Albany himself that Malcolm Stewart of Glenuskie
had been stabbed in the forest of Vincennes. This report Malcolm himself
accounted for. He had heard a Scots tongue among his foes, though
national feeling had made him utterly silent on that head to the Duke of
Bedford, and he guessed it to belong to a certain M'Kay, whose clan
regarded themselves as at feud with the Stewarts, and of whom he had
heard as living a wild _routier_ life. He had probably been hired by
Ghisbert for the attack, and had returned home and spread the report of
its success.

Some few weeks later, the Abbess Annabel continued, there had arrived two
monks from Coldingham, with an escort, declaring themselves to have
received orders from King James to transport the Lady Lilias to the
nunnery at Whitby, where the Abbess had promised to receive her, till he
could determine her fate.

The forlorn and desolate Lilias, believing herself to stand alone in the
world, was very loth to quit her shelter and her friends at St. Abbs; but
the Abbess, doubting her own ability to protect her from the rapacious
grasp of Walter Stewart, now that she had, as she believed, become an
heiress, and glad to avert from her house the persecution that such
protection would bring upon it, had gratefully heard of this act of
consideration on the King's part, and expedited her departure. The two
monks, Simon Bell and Ringan Johnstone, had not returned to the
monastery, but had been thought to be in the parent house at Durham; but
M