It was evident that the Earl William came to visit some one by means of the private staircase under cloud of night.

Nay, more, Maud Lindesay and he might be already privately married, and the matter kept secret on account of the pride of his family, who devised another match for him.

For though the daughter of a knight, Maud Lindesay was assuredly no fit mate for the head of the more than regal house of Douglas.

He remembered how on Sundays and saints' days Earl William always rode to and from the kirk with his sister on one side and Maud Lindesay on the other.

That the young Earl was by no means insensible to beauty, Sholto knew well, and he remembered his words to his own father, when he had asked to be allowed to accompany him on his Flanders mare, that such attendance was not seemly when a man was going a-courting.
As is always the case, he grew more and more confirmed in his ill humour, so soon as the eye of jealousy began to view everything in the light of prepossession.
Sholto awaked the cellarer out of his crib, who, presently, with snorts of disdain and much jangling of steel keys, drew half a tankard from a keg of spirit in the cellar on the dungeon floor and handed it grudgingly to the captain of the guard.
"The Frenchman wants it, does he ?" he growled.