The men now mounted again, and the three rode back in the midst of the
cavalcade of Douglas spears, the Chancellor talking as freely and
confidently to the Earl as if he had been his friend for years, while
the Earl of Douglas kept up the converse right willingly so long as,
looking past the Chancellor, his eyes could rest also upon the
delicately poised head and graceful form of the Lady Sybilla.

And behind them a horse's length the Marshal de Retz rode, smiling in
the depths of his blue-black beard, and looking at them out of the
wicks of his triangular eyes.

Presently the towers of the Castle of Crichton rose before them on its
green jutting spur. The Tyne Valley sank beneath into level meads and
rich pastures, while behind the Moorfoots spread brown and bare
without prominent peaks or distinguished glens, but nevertheless with
a certain large vagueness and solemnity peculiarly their own.

The _fêtes_ with which the Chancellor welcomed his guests were many
and splendid. But in one respect they differed from those which have
been described at Castle Thrieve. There was no military pomp of any
kind connected with them. The Chancellor studiously avoided all
pretence of any other distinction than that belonging to a plain man
whom circumstances have raised against his will to a position of
responsibility.

The thirty spears of the Earl's guard, indeed, constituted the whole
military force within or about the Castle of Crichton.

"I am a lawyer, my lord, a plain lawyer," he said; "all Scots lawyers
are plain. And I must ask you to garrison my bit peel-tower of