"I left Dunbar this day, at morn." "Be seated. Here, take a stoup of the Rochelle. Well, is not this accursed intelligence?" said Gray, grinding his teeth. "What! Howard, with five great ships, to be beaten by this old seahorse of Largo, this presumptuous Leither, with only two!--and Kraft, that damnable secretary, he may ruin us all!" "Think of three Scottish barons being at the mercy of an English notary!" said Borthwick, scanning them maliciously over his wine-pot, as it rose to the angle of forty-five degrees above his mouth. "And his book--and the bond in cypher," added Gray. "God confound this evil fortune!" growled Sir James Shaw. "To be at the beck of a smockfaced driveller! The thing is not to be borne, sirs; we must stop his mouth, by fair means or by foul." "Art certain, Hew, these rumours of victory are not exaggerated?" "There remains not the shadow of a doubt. With hundreds more--yea thousands--in East Lothian, I saw at dawn yesterday but two flags flying, as the six ships stood under sail for Fife, And these were the blue ensigns, with the white cross of Saint Andrew." "We must sleep in our harness, and keep fleet horses saddled day and night," said Gray; "and let spies be set to watch what messages come hither from the admiral." "Angus may see us clear of it," suggested Keir. "Angus knows nothing of our deeper plots," said the more politic and subtle Gray: "moreover, he abhors an English match as much as we pretend to hate a continental one--" "Among ourselves." "Of course. He cares not for rank--he is an earl; he cares not for pay--he is Lord of Galloway, and owns more land and lances than any four earls in Scotland." "He is well off! I'faith, I have been spending four thousand pounds yearly, out of a barony that yields birt one thousand Scottish crowns per year," said Shaw. "Henry of England will deem us fools for having our plots marred, and in revenge may tell the whole to Rothesay, and then we shall all be lost men." "Well, well," said Shaw, draining his huge tankard; "after all his gold spent and ships lost, it must be rather provoking to find that James III. is only removed to make little Maggie Drummond Queen of Scotland." "I urged Howard to throw her overboard," said Borthwick, lowering his voice, while that snaky gleam which his eyes often wore passed over them. "And what said Howard then?" asked Gray, impatiently. "The Saxon pockpudding! he smote me on the mouth with his steel glove, and styled your knighthoods a pack of 'Scottish hounds,'" replied Borthwick, whose sinister brow grew dark with ferocity; "and he threatened to make a martyr of me, like St. Clement." "Would to thy master the devil that he had done so," grumbled the drunken Shaw; thinking of his share in that dark deed in Beaton's mill. Gray muttered an impatient and unmeaning malediction. "What said ye then?" asked Keir, with a cold smile, as he played with his dagger. "I said little, but I thought much."