The Prince stood aside and watched it all. A little while before he had bidden Lord Murray ride at the head of the outgoing army. “I have no strategy, my lord,” he had said, with chiselled irony. “I lead only when attack comes from the front.” And Sir Jasper, with the instinct of old loyalty and new-found, passionate liking for the man, had drawn his own horse near to the Prince’s bridle; and they waited, the two of them, till the sad procession passed, as if to burial of their finest hopes. Not till Derby’s life is ended will she hear such trouble and such master-music as went up and down her streets on that disastrous, chilly dawn. The Highlanders were strong and simple-hearted men. They had obeyed their leaders, rather than the Prince who had sounded the forward note of battle. But no old allegiance could silence their pipers, who played a dirge to Prince Charles Edward, heir to the English throne. By one consent, it seemed, the pipers, as they went by their Prince, played only the one air. Low, insistent, mournful as the mists about their own wild hills, the air roamed up and down the wet, quiet streets, till it seemed there had been no other music since the world began. There was no hope, no quick compelling glamour, as of old; the pipes, it seemed, were broken-hearted like their leader, and they could only play for sorrow. Up and down the long, mean street, and down and up, between the wet house-fronts that reared themselves to the dying moon and the red murk of the dawn, the music roamed. And always it was the same air--the dirge known as “The Flowers of the Forest,” which was brought to birth when the Scots lost Flodden Field. Since Flodden, generation after generation, men skilled at the pipes had taught their growing youngsters the way of it; and now the ripe training of the fathers had gathered to a head. No pipers ever played, or ever will again, as those who greeted the Prince as they passed by him--greeted him, with sadness and with music, as heroes salute a comrade proven and well-loved. The riders and the men on foot went by. The tread of hoofs, the tread of feet, was slow and measured, as the tread of mourners is; and down and up, and up and down, the echoes of the pipes’ lament roamed through Derby’s street. It was an hour--and there are few such--when men, with their strength and their infirmities, and their rooted need of battle, grow tender and outspoken as little children, who have found no need as yet to face life in the open. The Prince and Sir Jasper were alone. The fighting men had passed them, and the chattering townsfolk. And from afar, down the silence of the empty street, the sorrow of the pipes came with a low, recurring lilt.