Under the gilt of flame and candle-light, the stone walls of the apartment showed down bare and cold; behind the depicted triumph loomed up the actual failure: defeat, the long distress of the flight, exile, despair, broken followers, mourning faces, empty pockets, friends estranged.

The memory of his father rose in his mind: he, too, estranged and defied; despair sharpened into wrath.

There was one who had led armies in the field, who had staked his life upon the family enterprise, a man of action and experience, of the open air, the camp, the court, the council-room; and he was to accept direction from an old, pompous gentleman in a home in Italy, and buzzed about by priests?
A pretty king, if he had not a martial son to lean upon! A king at all?
'There was a weaver (of all people) joined me at St.Ninians; he was more of a man than my papa!' he thought.

'I saw him lie doubled in his blood and a grenadier below him--and he died for my papa! All died for him, or risked the dying, and I lay for him all those months in the rain and skulked in heather like a fox; and now he writes me his advice! calls me Carluccio--me, the man of the house, the only king in that king's race.' He ground his teeth.

'The only king in Europe!' Who else?
Who has done and suffered except me?
who has lain and run and hidden with his faithful subjects, like a second Bruce?
Not my accursed cousin, Louis of France, at least, the lewd effeminate traitor!' And filling the glass to the brim, he drank a king's damnation.