As they rode westward towards it, they became day by day more conscious of the darkening down of the atmosphere of fear and suspicion, which, murky and lowering, overhung all that fair land of southern Brittany.
The vast pine forests from which rose the lonely towers of this the marshal's most remote castle could now be seen, serrated darkly against the broad belt of the sky.

The sombre blackness of their spreading branches, the yet blacker darkness where the gaps between their red trunks showed a way into the wood, increased the gloom of the weary travellers.

Yet they rode on, Sholto eagerly, Malise grimly, and the Lord James with the dogged resignation of a good knight who may be depended on to see an adventure through, however irksome it may be proving.
James of Avondale thought within himself that the others had greater interests in the quest than he--the younger MacKim having at stake the honour of his sweetheart Maud, the elder the life of his young mistress, the last of the Galloway house of Douglas.
Yet it was with that jolly heart of his beating strong and loyal under his brown palmer's coat, that James Douglas rode towards Machecoul, only whistling low to himself and wishing that something would happen to break the monotony of their journey.
Nor had he long to wait.

For just as the sun was setting they rode all three of them abreast into the little hamlet of Saint Philbert, and saw the sullen waters of the Etang de Grande Lieu spread marshy and brackish as far as the eye could reach, edged by peat bogs and overhung perilously by gloomy pines nodding over pools blacker than scrivener's ink.
As the three Scots looked into the stockaded entrance of the village, they could see the children playing on the long, irregular street, and the elder folk sitting about their doors in the evening light.
But as soon as the clatter of horses' hoofs was heard, borne from far down the aisles of the forest, there arose a sudden clamour and a crying.

From each little sparred enclosure rushed forth a woman who snatched a baby here and there and drove a herd of children before her indoors, glancing around and behind her as she did so with the anxious look of a motherly barn-door fowl when the hawk hangs poised in the windless sky.
By the time the three men had entered the gate and ridden up the village street, all was silent and dark.