In due time we gave him stately funeral, carrying him forth upon a day so calm, so breathless, that the banners did not wave as they swept the dust. And thereafter all life seemed to stop, when we came home again to the darkened house. James and Sandy, the two young lads, played no more in the tennis-courts, but went about with linked arms speaking of revenge. But little David abode with Nell and went forth only with her, clinging winsomely to her hand; for we kept us close within bars and warded ramparts, with the drawbridge up, watching the fruit ripening on the walls of the orchard of Culzean all that splendid summer of the murder of our lord and master. Slowly I thought over many things, till the resolve to bring the matter to a head came masterfully upon me. From the Earl as Bailzie of Carrick I got warrant, according to my dead master’s word and direction, to be doer-in-ordinary for the young man James, who was now the heir of Cassilis. For Earl John knew that Launcelot Kennedy was no self-seeker; also they that stood about had told to him the Tutor’s last words—that I was to be a good lad and to be kind to Nelly. It was Adam Boyd of Penkil, and David Somerville, hosier in Ayr, who told him this, and they were two of those that played golf by the sandhills on the day of that foul slaying under trust. *CHAPTER XXXI* *THE BLUE BLANKET* Yet because I needed advice and had none to give it, I rode one day to Edinburgh to see Maister Robert Bruce. I found the whole city in an uproar. There was the beating of drums in all the streets and closes, and a great multitude of the common folk crying out ’For God and the Kirk!’ Pikes danced merrily along the causeways, and good wives’ heads were thrust through all the port-holes in the windings of the stairs. Their voices, shrill and vehement, kept up a constant deafening clamour, each calling to her John or Tam to ’come awa’ in oot o’ that,’ or bidding them ’not to mell wi’ what concerned them not.’ ’What concern is the glory o’ God o’ yours—you that is but a baker in Coul’s Close?’ I heard one wife cry to her man, and it seemed to me a mightily pertinent question. At last, after many inquiries, I heard how the Minister of Edinburgh had bearded the King, so that he was gone off to Linlithgow in great indignation, and how that in a day or two Maister Robert Bruce would either be King of Scotland or lay his head on the block. Yet the minister was in his study chamber when I went to seek him, reading of his Bible and writing his sermon, as quietly as though there had been no King in Scotland—save, as it might be, the King in whose interest he had so often bearded King Jamie Stuart, sixth of that name. Robert Bruce looked up when he saw me. ’Ah, Launcelot,’ he cried, more heartily than ever I had heard him, ’ken ye, lad, that you are likely to be at the horn for communing with a wild rebel like me?’