On the green braes of Crichton, therefore, in due time the young Douglases arrived with their sparse train of thirty riders.

Sir William Crichton had ridden out to meet them across the innumerable little valleys which lie around Temple and Borthwick to the brow of that great heathy tableland which runs back from the Moorfoots clear to the Solway.
With him were only the Marshal de Retz and his niece, the Lady Sybilla.
Not a single squire or man-at-arms accompanied these three, for, as the Chancellor well judged, there was no way more likely effectually to lull the suspicions of a gallant man like the Douglas than to forestall him in generous confidence.
The three sat their horses and looked to the south for their guests at that delightsome hour of the summer gloaming when the last bees are reluctantly disengaging themselves from the dewy heather bells and the circling beetles begin their booming curfew.
"There they come!" cried de Retz, suddenly, pointing to a few specks of light which danced and dimpled between them and the low horizon of the south, against which, like a spacious armada, leaned a drift of primrose sunset clouds.
"There they come--I see them also!" said the Lady Sybilla, and suddenly sighed heavily and without cause.
"Where, and how many ?" cried the Chancellor, in a shrill pipe usually associated with the physically deformed, but which from him meant no more than anxious discomposure.
The marshal pointed with the steady hand of the practised commander to the spot at which his keen eye had detected the cavalcade.
"Yonder," he said, "where the pine tree stands up against the sky." "And how many?
I cannot see them, my eyesight fails.

I bid you tell me how many," gasped the Chancellor.
The ambassador looked long.
"There are, as I think, no more than twenty or thirty riders." Instantly the Chancellor turned and held out his hand.
"We have him," he muttered, withdrawing it again as soon as he saw that the ambassador did not take it, being occupied gazing under his palm at the approaching train of riders.
The Lady Sybilla sat silent and watched the company which rode towards them--with what thoughts in her heart, who shall venture to guess?
She kept her head studiously averted from the Marshal de Retz, and once when he touched her arm to call attention to something, she shuddered and moved a little nearer to the Chancellor.

Nevertheless, she obeyed her companion implicitly and without question when he bade her ride forward with them to receive the Chancellor's guests.
Crichton took it on himself to rally the girl on her silence.
"Of what may you be thinking so seriously ?" he said.
"Of thirty pieces of silver," she replied instantly.
And at these words the marshal turned upon the girl a regard so black and relentless that the Chancellor, happening to encounter it, shrank back abashed, even as some devilkin caught in a fault might shrink from the angry eyes of the Master of Evil.
But the Lady Sybilla looked calmly at her kinsman.
"Of what do you complain ?" he asked her.
"I complain of nothing," she made him answer.

"I am that which I am, and I am that which you have made me, my Lord of Retz.