Thus it was with Mary! She knew that the child of her affections regarded those affections as vile and worthless weeds! She knew that he was selfish, vain, and heartless! She knew that a single word from that child whom she still adored--if conveyed to her persecutor in the strong language of sincerity and earnestness--if borne, not by a fawning courtier, but by one of those high spirits which Scotland has found ever ready to her need--if enforced by threats of instant war--would have broken her fetters in a moment, and conveyed her from the dungeons of Fotheringay to the courts of Holyrood! All this she knew, yet her heart would not know it! And when all Europe rang with curses on the unnatural vacillation of that son; when every Scottish heart, whatever might be its policy or its party, despised his abject cringing; while Elizabeth herself, while she flattered his vanity, and affected to honor and esteem his virtue, scoffed in her royal privacy at the tool she designed to use in public--Mary alone, Mary, the only sufferer and victim of his baseness, still clung to the idea of his worth, still adored the child who was driving her out, as the scape-goat of the Jews, to expiate the sins of himself and his people by her own destruction! But it was not on James alone that her wayward memory was fixed. At a time when any soul less dauntless, any spirit less exalted, would have failed beneath its load of sorrows, Mary had a fond regret, a tear of sorrow, a sigh of sincere gratitude, for every gallant life that had devoted itself to ward from her that fate which their united loyalty had availed only to defer, not to avert. Chastelar passed before her, with his tones of sweetest melancholy, and that unutterable love, which made him invoke blessings on her who had doomed him to the block: and Darnley, as he had seemed in the few short hours when he had been, when he had deserved to be, the idol of her heart: and Bothwell, the eloquent, the glorious, but guilty Bothwell, her ruin and her betrayer: and Douglas, the noble, hapless Douglas, he who had riven the bolts of Loch Leven, and sent her forth to a short freedom and worse captivity: Huntley, and Hamilton, and Seyton, and Kirkaldy, the most formidable of her foes until he became the firmest of her friends--all passed in sad review before the eyes of her entranced imagination.