"Agreed," said the knight, "and it may be also that his Majesty will wish you to go upon the mission that your father was soon to have undertaken to Islay and Mull. 'Tis passing unfortunate that you are so young, Earl Kenric, and so little experienced in the arts of diplomacy that so marked your good father. But methinks his Majesty will be well pleased to see you, and to know what manner of man he has now to depend upon in his future dealings with the Norsemen. Your youth will assuredly be no disadvantage in the eyes of one who was monarch over all Scotland at eight years old." "Think you, Sir Piers, that we shall at last come to a war with these Norsemen?" asked Allan Redmain. "Of that I have little doubt, Allan," said Sir Piers. "Methinks the time is not far distant when the possession of the Western Isles must be determined at the point of the sword." This promise of coming strife was by no means unwelcome to Allan Redmain, for those peaceful and prosperous times gave but few occasions for the earnest exercise of the sword, though, indeed, the weapons of the chase were in constant use, and Allan felt the young blood course through his veins with quickened excitement at the prospect of engaging in a pitched battle against the valiant vikings of the North. As to Kenric, the one thing which made him somewhat less eager than Allan was his knowledge that there was now no immediate hope of meeting the slayer of his father in a hand-to-hand encounter. The outlawed Roderic was now far away on his pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and the vengeance might never be fulfilled. If war should come, and Kenric himself be slain, then Roderic was the next heir to the lordship of Bute, and whether King Alexander or King Hakon became the overlord and monarch, it mattered little, for Roderic would still make claim to his father's dominions. Earl Hamish of Bute had but a few days before his tragic death been into Scotland to render account to Alexander the Third concerning his mission to the King of Norway. That mission had failed in its object. The letters of Henry of England and His Majesty of Scots had not succeeded in persuading the Norse monarch to resign his claims to the dominion of the Western Isles. King Hakon claimed that those lands, from the Lewis in the north even to the Isle of Man in the south, were his by right of both conquest and possession, and that each and all of the island kings, or jarls, were bound in fealty and vassalage to Norway. On the other hand, King Alexander claimed that he held yet stronger rights of sovereignty, and that the islands were even by nature intended to be part of Scotland.