As Maxwell entered the apartment, a long, low room, plainly furnished and crowded with armed men, he was cordially greeted by the earl’s retainers, who had mustered in great force. They had seen his hand keep his head, against heavy odds, and they warmed to him at once as a kindred nature. Their meal seemed to be concluded, but the serious part of the entertainment was yet to commence; and large jacks of strong ale, with flasks of wine, standing at no great intervals on the board, denoted ample means of quenching the thirst engendered by a long ride. The warden rose to greet his new guest with frank courtesy, and bade him to the upper end of the room, where he himself sat at a cross table surrounded by the most distinguished of his guests. Bothwell had doffed his usual attire of steel jack and head-piece; he was now dressed in close-fitting doublet and hose, which set off the strong proportions of his figure to great advantage. Without pretensions to strict personal beauty, the warden had fine features, and a bold, frank bearing, not unpleasing. Though he had lost one of his eyes in a skirmish, the defect was scarcely observable, and the slight scar, left by the wound on his cheek and eyebrow, rather added to the characteristic expression of his face. It was that of a daring, perhaps a reckless man, one who was inured to danger and used to strife; yet was there something soft and even tender in his smile. Flushed with wine, and exchanging broad jests of the coarsest with his laughing guests, he looked a fitting leader in a revel or a charge; and yet a close observer would have detected a hollow ring in the loud laugh, a false note in the jovial strain, a capability for better things than feasting and fighting, and a self-accusing consciousness that it was lost and thrown away. The mirth was at its highest. If Bothwell was splendidly dressed, his costume was but sombre when compared with that of his princely guest, the Marquis d’Elbœuf, who shone with satin and jewellery in all the florid brilliancy of French decoration. If the warden’s draughts were deep, and his toasts objectionable, the Lords John and Robert Stuart, the Queen’s half-brothers, pledged him freely and out-talked him shamelessly, with a happy mixture of juvenile thirst and royal audacity. When Maxwell took his seat at the upper table, amidst these and two or three more of the wilder gallants of the Court, the wine had circulated freely, and the spirits of the party had risen to that point at which discretion ceases to interfere, and reason begins to discover that she has been all day in the wrong. D’Elbœuf flung himself into the spirit of the scene with the keen zest of his nation. The Admiral of France was the last man to refuse a challenge from friend or foe.