Young Lovell grumbled to himself that it was strange to set so new a man to the gate that he should not know his master’s son, and stranger still that the man should be of the men of his sister’s husband of Cullerford, for all their followers had russet beneath their steel facings. And then he saw old Elizabeth Campstones that had been help-maid to his mother’s nurse, coming out of the littlest door of the inner castle wall and down the path across the green grass of the glacis. She was all in hodden grey, she carried a great basket of tumbled clouts upon her head, and so the tears poured from her red eyes that at the first she did not see him though she came into the road at his horse’s forefoot. But when he said: "Why greet ye, Elizabeth?" she looked up at him on high as he sat there, as if the sun dazzled her eyes. And then she screamed, a high long scream. She caught at her basket and she ran to his bridle. "Come away," she cried out. "Cullerford and Haltwistle have ta’en your bonny Castle. Your father’s dead. Your mother’s jailed. There is no soul of yours true to you here." If there was one thing that distinguished the Young Lovell amongst the captains of the North—and his name was very well known to the Scots of the Border—it was that he was quick in thinking. And now, the kindling passion of war being the one thing that could drive away the thirst of love, made him see, as if it were a clear table laid out before him, the minds of his sisters that he knew very well and the dispositions of his brothers-in-law as well as the reed of the Decies that was not concealed from him. And, there being very little decency in his age, he knew that an hour or so in the Castle with his father dead and his mother no doubt grieved and shut in her bower, the men leaderless, since he, that had been his father’s lieutenant and ancient was absent—that short hour or two that had gone by—and it might well have been that his father had died over his cups at the board whilst he himself, the night before, was a-watch over his arms—would very well suffice to put Cullerford and Haltwhistle in possession of his Castle with all his own men butchered during their sleep. In those days it was grab while you could and get back at your leisure.