'And what an if there are? Back, every one of you! rogues that you be!--Here, Fitzhugh, see those villains back to the camp. Let their arms be given up to the Provost-marshal.--Kites and crows as you are! Away, out with you!' Henry pointed to the broken door, and the cowed and abashed soldiers slunk away from the terrible light of his eyes. No man could stand before the face of the King. There was a stillness. He stood leaning on his sword, his chest heaving with his panting breaths. He was naturally as fleet as the swift-footed Achilles, but the winter had told upon him, and the haste with which he had rushed to the rescue left him breathless and speechless, while he seemed as it were to nail the two lads to the spot by his steady gaze of mingled distress and displeasure. Neither could brook his eye: Percy hung his head like a boy in a scrape; Malcolm quailed with terror, but at the same time felt a keen sense of injury in being thus treated as a plunderer, and the blow under which his shoulder ached seemed an indignity to his royal blood. 'Boys,' said Henry, still low and breathlesly, but all the more impressively, 'what is to become of honour and mercy if such as you must needs become ravening wolves at scent of booty?' 'It was not booty, Sir; they said traitors were hid here,' said Percy, sulkily. 'Tush! the old story! Ever the plea for rapine and bloodthirstiness. After the warnings of last night you should have known better; but you are all alike in frenzy for a sack. You have both put off your knighthood till you have learnt not to become a shame thereto.' 'I take not knighthood at your hands, Sir,' burst out Malcolm, goaded with hot resentment, but startled the next moment at the sound of his own words. 'I cry you mercy,' said King Henry, in a cold, short tone. Malcolm turned on his heel and walked away, without waiting to see how the poor old man in the house threw himself at the King's feet with a piteous history of his sick daughter and her starving children, nor how Ralf hurried off headlong to the lower town to send them immediate relief in bread, wine, and doctors. The gay, good-natured, thoughtless lad no mere harboured malice for the chastisement than if his tutor had caught him idling; but things went deeper with Malcolm. True, he had undergone many a brutal jest and cruel practical joke from his cousins; but that was all in the family, not like a blow from an alien king, and one not apologized for, but followed up by a rebuke that seemed to him unjust, lowering him in his own eyes and those of Esclairmonde, and making him ready to gnaw himself with moody vexation. 'You here, Malcolm!' said King James, entering his quarters; 'did you miss me in the throng? I have not seen you all day.' 'I have been insulted, Sir,' said Malcolm. 'I pray your license to depart and carry my sword to my kinsmen in the French camp.' 'How now! Is it the way to treat an insult to run away from it?'