The weak and vicious Darnley yet lingered on his bed of sickness, but with the vigor of health many of the darker shades of his character had passed away; and Mary had again watched beside the bed of him whose foul suspicions and unmanly violence--no less than his scandalous neglect of her unrivalled charms, his low and infamous amours, his studied hatred of all whom she delighted to honor--had almost alienated the affections of that warm heart which once had beat so tenderly, so devotedly, and, had he but deserved its constancy, so constantly for him. Oh, how exquisite a thing is woman’s love! how beautiful, how strange a mystery, is woman’s heart! ’Twas but a little month ago that she had almost hated. Neglect had chilled the stream of her affections: that he whom she had made a king, whom she had loved with such total devotion of heart and mind--that he should repay her benefits with outrage, her affections with cold, chilling, insolent disdain--these were the thoughts that had worked her brain to the very verge of madness and of crime. The “glorious, rash, and hazardous”[F] young earl of Orkney had ever in these hours of bitter anguish been summoned, she knew not how, to her imagination: the warm yet delicate attentions, the reverential deference to her slightest wish, the dignified and chaste demeanor, through which gleamed ever and anon some flash of chivalrous affection--some token that in the recesses of his heart he worshipped the woman as fervently as he served the sovereign truly; the overmastering passion always apparent, but so apparent that it seemed involuntarily present; the eye dwelling for ever on her features, yet sinking modestly to earth, as shamed by his own boldness, if haply it met hers; the hand that trembled as it performed its office; the voice that faltered as it answered to the voice he seemed to love so dearly--all these, all these, had they been multiplied a hundred-fold, and aided by the deepest magic, had effected nothing to wean her heart from Darnley, had not his own infatuated cruelty furnished the strongest argument in favor of the young and noble Bothwell. As it was, harassed by the deepest wrongs from him who was most bound to cherish and support her, and assailed by the allurements of one who coupled to a beauty equal to that of angels a depth of purpose and dissimulation worthy of the fiend, Mary had tottered on the precipice’s verge! Darnley fell sick, and she was saved! Him whom she had almost learned to hate while he had rioted in all the insolence of manly strength and beauty, she now adored when he was stretched languid and helpless on the bed of anguish. She had rushed to his envenomed chamber, she had braved the perils of his contagious malady; her hand had soothed his burning brow, her lip had tasted the potion which his feverish palate had refused; day and night she had watched over him as a mother watches over her sick infant, in mingled agonies of hope and terror; she had