On hearing this threat, the two Drummonds, who shared all the indignation of their chief, twisted their shaggy mustachios, and played with the hilts of their long iron-hilted swords, in their fiery impatience. "I am as little accustomed to deceive, my lord, as I am to be disbelieved or misunderstood," replied the prince; "and again I swear to you, by all we hold most sacred, that I have spoken to the verity, and the verity alone. My Margaret----" "Behold the only trace of her," said Lord Drummond, as he roughly grasped Rothesay's hand, and drew him a few paces down the wynd, to where they could see the north-east tower of his mansion. There Rothesay's eye first caught sight of Margaret's well-known window. It was open: the fragments of a rope-ladder were yet streaming out upon the wind, and various passengers were grouped in the street below, conferring and surmising, with upturned faces, on what had happened there overnight. On beholding these ocular proofs of some terrible catastrophe, the prince lost alike his patience and presence of mind. He unsheathed his sword, and exclaimed, "We have been discovered and betrayed!" "Thank God, this emotion seems genuine!" said Drummond, as he leaned on his long weapon, and grimly scrutinized the prince; "betrayed, sayst thou? but by whom, dost thou think?" "By some of my father's favourites." "Right! by the hand of St. Fillan, I thought these varlets had something to do with this outrage. Can the king know it, think ye?" asked Drummond, with a terrible glare in his eyes, as he turned to his kinsmen, Balloch and Carnock, who both drew their swords, as if by instinctive use and wont. "Alas, I said not _that_," replied Rothesay, giving way to tears; "but my mind is a chaos--I can no longer think." "'Sblood--act, then!" "How now, my lord--your highness--gentlemen, what is astir?" asked Sir Patrick Gray, stepping out of a daggermaker's shop at that moment; "beware, sirs--and up with your swords; remember that it is an act of treason to draw within four miles of the king or the lord high constable, and both are now in our burgh of bonnie Dundee." "Damn the constable, and the burgh of Dundee to boot! My daughter Margaret has been carried off by violence; there hath been hership and hamesücken overnight, Sir Patrick, and as a knight and gentleman, and moreover as the king's good soldier, I claim your assistance." "Carried off!--the beautiful Margaret!" exclaimed Gray, with well-feigned astonishment; "by St. Mirran! there hath been foul play, then; for alas, my lord, as last night I rode along the beach to Broughty, I heard shrill cries, as from a woman on the water." "Kyrie Eleison!" ejaculated the prince, trembling, and growing paler than death, at the terrible thoughts this information suggested, and he wept aloud. "Some of James's courtly minions----" began Gray.