s head. And
saving among his own company, no man did him any honour, which caused
him to grin with wicked sidelong smiles of hate and envy.

Then amid the shouting of the people there appeared, on a milk-white
palfrey, Margaret, the Earl's only sister, already famous over all
Scotland as "The Fair Maid of Galloway." With her rode one who, in the
esteem of most who saw the pair that day, was a yet rarer flower, even
Maud Lindesay, who had come out of the bleak North to keep the lonely
little maid company. For Margaret of Douglas was yet no more than a
child, but Maud Lindesay was nineteen years of age and in the first
perfect bloom of her beauty.

Behind these two came the whole array of the knights and barons who
owned allegiance to the Douglas,--Herons and Maxwells, Ardwell
Macullochs, Gordons from the Glen of Kells, with Agnews and MacDowalls
from the Shireside. But above all, and outnumbering all, there were
the lesser chiefs of the mighty name--Douglases of the North, the
future Moray and Ormond among them, the noble young sons of James the
Gross of Avondale, who rode nearest their cousin, the head of the
clan. Then came Douglases of the Border, Douglases of the Hermitage,
of Renfrew, of Douglasdale. Every third man in that great company
which splashed and caracoled through the fords of Lochar, was a
William, a James, or an Archibald Douglas. The King himself could not
have raised in all Scotland such a following, and it is small wonder
if the heart of the young man expanded within him.

Presently, soon after the arrival of the cavalcade, the great
wappenshaw was set in array, and forming up company by company the
long double line extended as far as the eye could reach from north to
south along the side of the broad and sluggish-moving river.

Sholto, who in virtue of his courage and good marksmanship had been
placed over the archer company which waited on the right of the ford,
fell in immediately behind the _cortege_ of the Earl. He was first man
of all to have his equipment examined, and his weapons obtained, as
they deserved, the commendation of his liege lord, and the grim
unwilling approval of Malise, the master armourer, whose unerring eye
could not detect so much as a speck on the shirt of mail, or a grain
of rust on the waist brace of shining steel.

Then the Earl rode down the lines, and Sholto, remembering the
encounter amidst the dust of the roadway, breathed more freely when he
saw his father's ba