"He is a winsome man, and a gallant," lisped the Countess of Argyle over her pouncet-box.
"He has an eye that looks well below a helmet peak," added the Lady Athole, as she adjusted her long fardingale.
"O, were he single, I would marry him to-morrow!" laughed little Mariette Hubert, glancing furtively at Darnley's shining figure.
"If thou art anxious to be a rich widow, 'twere a good match, Mariette," replied the young King, with one of his icy smiles, as he turned away; and, whistling a hunting air, descended to the court-yard, and departed on a hawking expedition, attended by a few of his own personal retinue, who were invariably composed of his father's Catholic vassals from the district known as the Lennox.
CHAPTER IV.
THE LEITH WYND PORTE.
——On they pass'd,
And reach'd the city gate at last;
Where all around a wakeful guard,
Arm'd burghers, kept their watch and ward.
Marmion.
Towards the close of a sultry day, two travellers approached one of the eastern gates of Edinburgh, when the burgher guard were about to close it for the night.
The sun of June had set behind the distant Ochils, and his last rays were fading away from the reddened summit of St. Giles's spire, and the dark grey mansions of that ancient capital, whose history is like a romance.
The mowers, who the livelong day had bent them over the grass on many a verdant rig and holm, that are now covered by the streets and squares of the new city, had quitted their rural occupations. Between green hedgerows and fields of ripening corn, the lowing herds were driven to pen and byre in many a rural grange and thatch-roofed homestead; the bonneted shepherd that washed his sheep in the city lochs, and tended them by night on the braes of Warriston and Halkerston's crofts, could little foresee the new world of stone and lime, of gas, of steam, of bustle, and business, that was to spread over these lonely and sequestered places.