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enamored of redheaded Janet, daughter of Lord Kennedy, and she remained his mistress until she became the King's.
    They were thrilling days and nights James spent in Janet's company. She combined ambition with passion, and her possessiveness was a little alarming, for James was a man who liked to live on good terms with all about him. He wanted his own way and where women were concerned there was a compulsion within him to takeit, but he continually endeavored to extricate himself from a difficult situation by diplomacy rather than by quarrels.
    He was deep in his love affair with Janet Kennedy when Margaret Drummond came back into his life.
    It was some twelve years since they had dallied on the banks of the Tay, and Margaret had grown into a serene and beautiful woman. She had never married, she told him, but there were no reproaches;
she
understood perfectly that a king could not marry where he wished, but the boy who had made his promises at Stobhall had not. She had never ceased to love him. “Why,” she said, “I shall always remember that I once had your love…your first love, and that is enough to make me happy for the rest of my life.”
    Now James saw what he had lost, and that Margaret could make him happy as neither Marian nor Janet ever could. Serene, disinterested, she could be passionate, giving wholeheartedly of her love and never demanding any favors in return; which was, he saw now, the only way to love. It had taken him years of experience to discover this. They were no longer very young, since they were both approaching their twenty-seventh birthdays.
    “Nothing shall ever separate us again,” declared James vehemently. “I am King now and shall not be diverted from my purpose.”
    It was Janet who temporarily diverted him. When he tried to explain to her, she faced him with a blazing desire which he was unable to resist and that which was meant to be a brief farewell was a night of such wild passion that he began to wonder whether even Margaret could free him from the spell Janet Kennedy had cast over him.
    “Can she love like this?” demanded Janet.
    Janet was wily. That night their son was conceived. A lover of children could not be indifferent to his own child.
    He continued to see Janet, and Margaret did not complain. She was the perfect mistress; always kind, always understanding.
    I will keep that promise I made all those years ago, James told himself. I will marry Margaret.
    And so they had moved slowly toward that tragic climax. He was going to marry Margaret Drummond. She had already bornehim a daughter who was named after her and who James insisted should be known as the Lady Margaret Stuart. Janet's son was born two years after Margaret's, and James loved these two children so dearly that it was difficult for him to say which he loved the more. And if he could not discard a mistress, how could he discard a child?
    Memories of his own childhood were often with him. He was not going to let his little James suffer as
he
had. Therefore he must pay visits to his son, and it was natural that the boy would be with his mother; so during those years of indecision, both Janet and Margaret continued to hold sway over him—Janet by the violence of her emotion, Margaret by the serenity of hers.
    But it was Margaret whom he loved; and he decided that before his marriage with her he would make a clean break with Janet.
    When he visited her and told her of his proposed marriage she veiled her heavy-lidded eyes and threw back her flaming hair, but she did not look at him.
    “I am determined,” he told her. “And this must be the end between us.”
    “And our son?”
    “Do not think I shall ever forget him. He shall be created Earl of Moray; and you shall not be forgotten either. I shall bestow on you the Castle of Darnaway and the forests surrounding it. It shall be yours unless you marry or live with any other man. In which case it would revert to me.”
    Janet closed her eyes and nodded. The