with many a manly voice swelling more lustily the nuptial cadence, they passed the little green descending to the horse-road, Marguerite clinging now to his supporting arm and looking tenderly up into his with eyes suffused with happy tears and cheeks radiant with dimpled smiles and rosy blushes. But at the moment when the bridal-train was wheeling down toward the road, and had now nearly reached the point of its intersection with the foot-path, the loud and noisy trampling of many horses, and the jingling clash of the harness of armed riders, was distinctly heard above the swelling chorus of the hymenean, above the chiming of the wedding-bells; and within a few seconds, two or three horsemen crossed the brow of the eastern hill, at a gentle trot, and were followed by a company of some fifty men-at-arms, under the guidance of an old officer, whose beard and hair, as white as snow, fell down over his gorget from beneath the small, black-velvet cap, which alone covered his head, for his helmet hung at his saddle-bow. The troopers were all armed point-device, in perfect steel, with long, pennoned lances in their hands, two-handed broadswords slung across their shoulders from the left to the right, and battle-axe and mace depending on this side or that from the pommels of their steel-plated saddles. Their horses, too--strong, powerful brutes of the Norman stock, crossed with some lighter strain of higher blood--were barded, as it was termed, with chamfronts and neck-plates, poitrels on the breast, and the bards proper covering the loins and croup; and all were arrayed under a broad, square banner, blazoned, as if every eye of the bridal-party could at once distinguish, with the bearings of the lords of Castel de Roche d’or. No sooner had they discovered this, than they halted, and formed a line along the edge of the road, anxious to testify their respect to their young lord--who now, recently of age, was returning, after years of absence, from the château of his guardian--and eager to observe the passage of the cavalcade. The persons who led the approaching band were three in number, two of whom rode a few horse-lengths in advance of the third, and were evidently of rank superior to the rest; while something seemed to indicate, though it was indefinite, and not very obvious how far it did so, that even between these two there subsisted no perfect equality. He to the left was the elder by many years; a finely-formed and not ill-favored man, of some forty-five or fifty years; magnificently apparelled in a suit of rich half-armor, with russet-leather boots meeting the taslets or thigh-pieces at the knee; accoutred with heavy gilded spurs, and wearing on his head a crimson-velvet mortier, adorned by a massive gold chain, and a lofty plume of white feathers.