So they rode on, through the woods mostly, until they reached a region which to the Earl appeared unfamiliar.  The glades were greener and denser.  The trees seemed more primeval, the foliage thicker overhead, the interspaces of the golden evening sky darker and less frequent.

“In what place may your company be assembled?” he asked.  “Strange it is that I know not this spot.  Yet I should recognise each tree by conning it, and of every rivulet in Galloway I should be able to tell the name.  Yet with shame do I confess that I know not where I am.”

“Ah,” said the girl, her face growing luminous through the gloom, “you called me a witch, and now you shall see.  I wave my hands, so—­and you are no more in Galloway.  You are in the land of faery.  I blow you a kiss, so—­and lo! you are no more William, sixth Earl of Douglas and proximate Duke of Touraine, but you are even as True Thomas, the Beloved of the Queen of the Fairies, and the slave of her spell!”

“I am indeed well content to be Thomas Rhymer,” he answered, submitting himself to the wooing glamour of her eyes, “so be that you are the Lady of the milk-white hind!”

“A courtier indeed,” she laughed; “you need not to seek your answer.  You make a poor girl afraid.  But see, yonder are the lights of my pavilion.  Will it please you to alight and enter?  The supper will be spread, and though you must not expect any to entertain you, save only this your poor Queen Mab” (here she made him a little bow), “yet I think you will not be ill content.  They do not say that Thomas of Ercildoune had any cause for complaint.  Do you know,” she continued, a fresh gaiety striking into her voice, “it was in this very wood that he was lost.”

But William Douglas sat silent with the wonder of what he saw.  Their horses had all at once come out on a hilltop.  The sequestered boskage of the trees had gradually thinned, finally dwarfing into a green drift of fern and birchen foliage which rose no higher than Black Darnaway’s chest, and through which his rider’s laced boots brushed till the Spanish leather of their gold-embossed frontlets was all jetted with gouts of dew.

Before him swept horizonwards a great upward drift of solemn pine trees, the like of which for size he had never seen in all his domain.  Or so, at least, it seemed in that hour of mystery and glamour.  For behind them the evening sky had dulled to a deep and solemn wash of blood red, across which lay one lonely bar of black cloud, solid as spilled ink on a monkish page.  But under the trees themselves, blazing with lamps and breathing odours of all grace and daintiness, stood a lighted pavilion of rose-coloured silk, anchored to the ground with ropes of sendal of the richest crimson hue.

“Let your horse go free, or tether him to a pine; in either case he will not wander far,” said the girl.  “I fear my fellows have gone off to lay in provisions.  We have taken a day or two more on the way than we had counted on, so that to-night’s feast makes an end of our store.  But still there is enough for two.  I bid you welcome, Earl William, to a wanderer’s tent.  There is much that I would say to you.”