His half-intoxicated companion looked slyly at him over his inverted tankard, and replied,
"Get a warrant of search, and send every macer, messenger-at-arms, and toun guardsman after your dearie—he, he! and proclaim at the cross by tuck of drum, that the Right Honourable the Lord Clermistonlee, Baron of Drumsheugh and Knight of the Thistle, will pay one thousand marks of our gude Scottish money to the discoverer, or producer——"
"Hush, Mersington, you jest too much on this matter. Withered be my tongue for speaking of this project to thee—but the deed is done, and I might as well have proclaimed it by sound of trumpet at the Tron."
"You have been a wild buckie in your day, Randal," said Lord Mersington; "and when I think o' all the braw queans, gentle as weel as simple, that you have loved and abandoned, gude-lackaday! I marvel that the whinger of some fierce brother or father hath not cut short your career o' gallantry. How about your fair one in Merlin's Wynd?"
"Pshaw! I tired of her long ago."
"And Lady Mary Charteris?"
"By all the devils, 'tis very droll to hear you speak of a noble lady and a poor bona-roba in the same breath. Mary is beautiful, magnificently so, but wary, proud, and poor—we would hate each other in a week. Now I really think little Lilian Napier is capable of fixing all my wandering fancies into one focus for life."
"He, he," chuckled Mersington, "I have heard you say the same o' twenty. But a peer of the realm, heir of—"
"The whole heraldic honours of the house of Clermont, which you see on yonder window-pane, or, three bars wavy embattled, surmounted by a lion sable—argent, a bend engrailed gules, and so forth. Ha, ha!"
"The coronet aboon them is a braw die, and ane that glitters weel in lassies' een."