"But what will the Lords Home and Hailes—Bothwell, I mean—say to this?"
"The constable put the same question to yonder gorbellied admiral, who replied that the king had undertaken to pacify them; but it was no business of his—a mariner's—to study such ware; then he added something about a gunner and his lintstock, a steersman and his helm, which I did not understand, but conceived to mean something insolent to the nobility."
"And doubtless it was so—the tarry varlet!" said Gray, stamping his armed heel on the paved floor; "Sir James, thou amazest by all this! but where tarries now the Lord Angus?"
"He is hunting the red-deer on the wild Rinns of Galloway," replied Shaw, with a reckless laugh.
"I might have shrewdly guessed he was not on this side of the Howe of Fife."
"Are there any fresh tidings from Henry of England?"
"Henry expects them from us," said Gray with one of his hissing whispers and deep satanic smiles.
"True—I am forgetting our fair stipulation, penned by Master Quentin Kraft, and of which there are duplicates in London, to the effect that he—that is, King Henry—shall use all interest with our king to have my barony of Sauchie erected into an earldom—"
"And my barony of Kyneff and estate of Caterline erected into a lordship; I do not see why I should not have put in for an earldom too—but I shall content me if made as good as my chief, Kinfauns; though I would make as noble a Scottish peer as most of them."
For once in his life, Sir Patrick Gray spoke truth.