Draw off these people, Woodcock,--and you, Roland Graeme,
attend me."
The page followed him in silence into the Abbot's house, where,
stepping into the first apartment which he found open, he commanded
one of his attendants to let his brother, Master Edward Glendinning,
know that he desired to speak with him. The men-at-arms went gladly
off to join their comrade, Adam Woodcock, and the jolly crew whom he
had assembled at Dame Martin's, the hostler's wife, and the Page and
Knight were left alone in the apartment. Sir Halbert Glendinning paced
the floor for a moment in silence and then thus addressed his
attendant--
"Thou mayest have remarked, stripling, that I have but seldom
distinguished thee by much notice;--I see thy colour rises, but do not
speak till thou nearest me out. I say I have never much distinguished
thee, not because I did not see that in thee which I might well have
praised, but because I saw something blameable, which such praises
might have made worse. Thy mistress, dealing according to her pleasure
in her own household, as no one had better reason or title, had picked
thee from the rest, and treated thee more like a relation than a
domestic; and if thou didst show some vanity and petulance under such
distinction, it were injustice not to say that thou hast profited both
in thy exercises and in thy breeding, and hast shown many sparkles of
a gentle and manly spirit. Moreover, it were ungenerous, having bred
thee up freakish and fiery, to dismiss thee to want or wandering, for
showing that very peevishness and impatience of discipline which arose
from thy too delicate nurture.
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