But it chanced that Sir Thomas, so soon almost as he set foot over the doorstep, greeted his fellow-guest, the Provost of the town—who, as became his office, had with him one to hold the tail of his furred gown out of the clarty mud, and also a lad with a torch running before him. Nevertheless, I followed on in that darker dusk which succeeds the glare of a torch. On our way we had to pass through the garden behind the house of Sir Thomas Nisbett, which was full of groset bushes, divided by high hedges of yew and box. I came softly after them, and abode still by the gate when the Provost and his train had passed through with our good knight in their midst. The pair of them were talking jovially together as they went, like men with toom kytes that know they are going in to be filled with good cheer. ’I declare I am as hungry as a moudiewort in a black frost,’ said the douce Provost. ’I haena seen meat the day. What wi’ hearkening to auld wives denouncing ane anither for kenned and notour witches, and sending men of the tribes of little Egypt to the Tolbooth, my life has no been my ain.’ My master laughed loudly and heartsomely. ’It is weel to be hungry and ken o’ meat,’ he replied, in the words of the well-kenned proverb. And the pair of them laughed with their noses in the air, easily mirthful like men that strengthen themselves with the comfortable smell of dinner blown through an open door. But I question much whether they had laughed so heartily if they had seen what I saw at that moment. And that was a face looking over the height of the yew hedge—a face wrapped about the mouth with a grey plaid and with a grey brimmed hat pulled close down over the eyes. As the flickering of the torch died out at the entering in of the house door, I saw the man raise his hand in a warning and forbidding gesture, as though he made a signal to men who could see him, but who were hidden from my sight. This was enough for me. I resolved that those who plotted evil behind backs should have to war with Launce Kennedy, who, at least, was no mean foe, and one not given to wearing his eyes under his coat. Not for a moment after this could I leave the garden, for one of the villains might have gone to the window and shot at my master through the glass—as one had done years before to good Maister John Knox (who, as I have heard tell, reformed religion in this land) on an evening he sat quietly reading his book and drinking of his ale in his own house in the High Street of Edinburgh. So I got me into an angle of the garden and climbed a wall, which, being grown with ivy, was a good and safe post of vantage. From thence I could overlook the whole enclosure. After a little my eyes became better accustomed to the darkness. The lights from the windows also made a faint glimmering athwart the hedges, and I could distinctly see men darning themselves into their hiding-places, and getting ready their pistols and hackbutts.