Patrick, therefore, refused to take the monastic vow. He "had heard of war, And longed to follow to the field some warlike lord." He, however, was beloved by all; and when he left the monastery, the Abbot and the brethren gave him their benediction, and bestowed gifts upon him. He also carried with him letters from the Lord Abbot and Prior, to men who were mighty in power at the court of King Philip of France. From the testimonials which he brought with him, Patrick Douglas, the Scottish orphan, speedily obtained favour in the eyes of King Philip and his nobles, and became as distinguished on the field for his prowess and the feats of his arms, as he had been in the Abbey of Melrose for his attainments in learning. But a period of peace came; and he who was but a few years before a shepherd boy by Tweedside, now bearing honours conferred on him by a foreign monarch, was invited as a guest to the palace of the illustrious Count of Dreux. A hundred nobles were there, each exhibiting all the pageantry of the age; and there, too, were a hundred ladies, vying with each other in beauty, and in the splendour of their array. But chief of all was Jolande, the daughter of their host, the Count of Dreux, and the fame of whose charms had spread throughout Christendom. Troubadours sang of her beauty, and princes bent the knee before her. Patrick Douglas beheld her charms. He gazed on them with a mixed feeling of awe, of regret, and of admiration. His eyes followed her, and his soul followed them. He beheld the devoirs which the great and the noble paid to her, and his heart was heavy; for she was the fairest and the proudest flower among the French nobility --he an exotic weed of desert birth. And, while princes strove for her hand, he remembered, he felt, that he was an orphan of foreign and of obscure parentage--a scholar by accident, (but to be a scholar was no recommendation in those days, and it is but seldom that it is one even now.) and a soldier of fortune, to whose name royal honours were not attached, while his purse was light, and who, because his feet covered more ground than he could call his own, his heels were denied the insignia of knighthood. Yet, while he ventured not to breathe his thoughts or wishes before her, he imagined that she looked on him more kindly, and that she smiled on him more frequently than on his lordly rivals; and his heart deceived itself, and rejoiced in secret.