The sides of the break were fresh, bright, and true.
"Now look at the edge of your sword," she said.
There was no slightest dint anywhere upon it, so that Sholto, armourer's son as he was, turned about the blade to see if by any chance he could have smitten with the reverse.
Failing in this, he could only kneel to his lady and say, "This is a great gift--I am not worthy." For in these times of peril jewels and lands were as nothing to the value of such a suit of armour, which kings and princes might well have made war to obtain.
The faintest disembodied ghost of a smile passed over the face of the Countess of Douglas.
"It is the best I can do with it now," she said, "and at least no one of the Avondales shall ever possess it." After the Lady Douglas had armed the young knight and sped him upon his quest, Sholto departed over the bridge where the surly custodian still grumbled at his horse's feet trampling his clean wooden flooring.

The young man rode a Spanish jennet of good stock, a plain beast to look upon, neither likely to attract attention nor yet to stir cupidity.
His father and Laurence were already on their way.

Sholto had arranged that whether they found any trace of the lost ones or no, they were all to meet on the third day at the little town of Kirkcudbright.

For Sholto, warned by the Lady Sybilla, even at this time had his idea, which, because of the very horror of it, he had as yet communicated to no one.
It chanced that as the youth rode southward along the banks of the Dee, glancing this way and that for traces of the missing maids, but seeing only the grass trampled by hundreds of feet and the boats in the stream dragging every pool with grapnels and ropes, two horsemen on rough ponies ambled along some distance in front of him.

By their robes of decent brown they seemed merchants on a journey, portly of figure, and consequential of bearing.
As Sholto rapidly made up to them, with his better horse and lighter weight, he perceived that the travellers were those two admirable and noteworthy magistrates of Dumfries, Robert Semple and his own uncle Ninian Halliburton of the Vennel.
Hearing the clatter of the jennet's hoofs, they turned about suddenly with mighty serious countenances.