"Ask these wounds, dear mother; they have kept me for fourteen days a-bed and absent from you," he replied, as he tore open his crimson doublet, and shirt, and displayed on his bosom the sword-thrust, which was scarcely skinned over.
"Kyrie eleison!" muttered the white-haired vicar, lifting up his thin hands and hollow eyes.
Roger of the Westmains uttered a shout of rage and grasped his dagger.
"My bairn—my braw, bonnie bairn!" exclaimed the old nurse with tender commiseration.
"Florence," said his mother through her clenched teeth, "whose sword did this?"
"Can you ask me, mother?"
"His!—would you say?" she asked in a voice like a shriek, while pointing with her lean white hand to Preston Tower, the walls of which above the level landscape shone redly in the morning sun.
"Nay, not his, but the swords of his followers."
"Of Symon Brodie and Mungo Tennant?"
"Even so; I heard their names in the mêlée."