"And if Maid Betsy A'hannay comes to take me away, I want you to stretch out your hand like this, and say: 'Seneschal, remove that besom to the deep dungeon beneath the castle moat,' as we used to do in our plays before you became a great man.

Then I could stay very long and talk to you all through the night, for Maud Lindesay sleeps so sound that nothing can awake her." Gradually the anger passed out of the face of William Douglas as he listened to his sister's prattle, like the vapours from the surface of a hill tarn when the sun rises in his strength.

He even thought with some self-reproach of his treatment of Malise and of his uncle the Abbot.

But a glance at the ring on his finger, and the thought of what might have been his good fortune at that moment but for their interference, again hardened his resolution to adamant within his breast.
His sister's voice, clear and high in its childish treble, recalled him to himself.
"Oh, William, and there is such news; I forgot, because I have been so overbusied with arranging my new puppet's house that Malise made for me.

But scarcely were you gone away on Black Darnaway ere a messenger came from our granduncle James at Avondale that he and my cousins Will and James arrive to-morrow at the Thrieve with a company to attend the wappenshaw." The young man sprang to his feet, and dashed one hand into the palm of the other.
"This is ill tidings indeed!" he cried.