I am glad I made you a knight on the field of honour, Sir Sholto, for then they cannot hang you to a bough, like a varlet caught stealing the King's venison." Sholto slowly came over to the window-seat and stood there respectfully as before, with his arms straight at his side, feeling more than anything else the lack of his sword-hilt to set his right hand upon.
"Nay, but do as I bid you," said the Earl, looking up at him; "sit down, Sholto." And Sholto sat on the window-seat and looked forth upon the lights leaping out one after another down among the crowded gables of the town as this and that burgher lit lamp or lantern at the nearing of the hour of supper.
Far away over the shore-lands the narrow strip of the Forth showed amethystine and mysterious, and farther out still the coast of Fife lay in a sort of opaline haze.
"I wonder," said William Douglas, after a long pause, "what they have done with our good lads.

Had they been taken or perished we had surely heard more noise, I warrant.

Two score lads of Galloway would not give up their arms without a tulzie for it." "They might induce them to leave them behind, when they went out to take their pleasures among the maids of the Lawnmarket," said Sholto.
"Not their swords," said the Earl, "it needed all your lord's commands to make yours quit your side.

I warrant these fellows will give an excellent account of themselves." Presently the night fell darker, and a smurr of rain drifted over from the edges of Pentland, mostly passing high above, but with lower fringes that dragged, as it were, on the Castle Rock and the Hill of Calton.
The three young men were still silently looking out when suddenly from the darkness underneath there came a low voice.
"'Ware window!" it said, "stand back there above." To Sholto the words sounded curiously familiar, and almost without thinking what he did, he seized the Earl and his brother and dragged them away from the wide space of the lattice, which opened into the summer's night.
"'Ware window!" came again the cautious voice from far below.

Sholto heard the whistle and "spat" of an arrow against the wall without.