In the house of Barton, the insurgent nobles held a deep carouse, and drank the Rhenish and Malvoisie of the umquhile Sir Andrew with a relish all the greater that it cost them nothing. Among the company were four persons, at least, who would rather have hailed a disastrous defeat than this unexpected victory. These were the Lords Home and Hailes--who had great hopes that their troublesome rivals might have been sent to a better world; but chiefly Sir Patrick Gray and Sir James Shaw, with others of their servile and infamous faction, who were thunderstruck by the intelligence; for they had never doubted, when the Admiral dropped down the river with two vessels only, that he was running into the jaws of destruction. But it is strange that Wood, in all his naval battles, had to contend against great odds, yet never _once_ was beaten. And now the cosmopolitans of the English faction trembled, as they remembered their bond with Henry, and feared that unless the lips of Margaret Drummond were sealed for ever, their projects would all be revealed to Rothesay, of whom, boy as he was, they knew enough to be assured of a terrible retribution. Lord Drummond--that irascible old patrician--had peremptorily warned his daughters Euphemia and Sybilla to prepare for being espoused by Home and Hailes, whose new patents of nobility, he believed, would be issued as soon as the king's _flight_--his murder was yet unknown--was ascertained, and as soon as Rothesay was proclaimed king. Their uncle, the Dean of Dunblane--a facile priest, in all things subservient to his brother as chief of the clan Drummond, and, like most Scottish churchmen of that age, bent solely on the aggrandizement of his family,--was to perform the ceremony, which was fixed to take place on an early day. And as the venerable dean had long since been abstracted from all human sympathies, and become a mere mummy in a cassock and scapular, the poor girls had now no hope in anything, and no resource but their tears, which were likely to avail them little; for in Scotland, in those days, the rights of women were as little known, or nearly as ill defined, as among the Asiatics in the present; for cruel coercion and abduction at the sword's point were of daily occurrence, as the criminal records show, until the middle of the last century.