The father regarded his son with not disagreeable complacency, like a carthorse who had begotten a slight and swift barb. The boy’s soft ways and gentle speeches amused him till he laughed tears at times; his daring and hot, rash passions pleased his father still more. He had challenged six Italian squires on the Lido to combat with the rapier, the long sword, the axe and the dagger, and only with the rapier had he been twice worsted—and this quite well contented his father, who regarded him as a queer, new-fangled growth, but in no wise a disgraceful one. He set the boy, in fact, down to his mother’s account. And this he did with some warrant, for the boy was the first blond child that had been born to the Lovells in a hundred years. Further back than that the Lovells could not go. They were descended from one Ruthven, a Welsh brigand of whom, a hundred and twenty years before, it was written that he and his companions kept the country between the Rivers Seine and Loire so that none dare ride between Paris and Orleans, nor between Paris and Montargis. These robbers had made that Ruthven a knight and their captain. There were no towns in that district that did not suffer pillage and over-running from them, not Saint Arnold, Gaillardon, Chatillon or even Chartres itself. In that way Ruthven had amassed a marvellous great booty until, the country of France having been submitted to the English, he had set sail, with much of his wealth, for Edinburgh, but liking the Scots little, after he had married a Scots woman called Lovell, he had come south into the Percies’ country. It had happened that the Percies had at that date five squires of their house in prison to the Douglas and had little money for their ransoming. So this Ruthven had bought of them seventy farms and land on which to build an outer wall round the fortress that, boastfully, he called the Castle, as if there had been no other castle in that land. And indeed, it was a marvellously strong place, over the sea on its crags of basalt. Thus had arisen, from huge wealth, the great family of the Lovells of the Castle. For Ruthven had not wished to be known by his name, and indeed King Henry V swore that none of that name should have Lordship nor even Knighthood, though the Ruthven of that day fought well at Agincourt, losing three horses, two of which he had taken from French lords. So, since that day they had been the Lords Lovell of the Castle with none to gainsay them, though till latterly they had been held for rough lords and not over-reverend. The Percies looked down their noses when they met them, and so did the captains of Bamburgh and Holy Island. However, in the year 1459 the Lord Lovell had found the Lady Rohtraut of the Dacres to marry him and, having had three daughters, she bore him the Young Lovell though one of the daughters died.