It was a mournful sight--that beautiful and brilliant woman yielding herself to the thraldom of a wicked man, and rushing heedlessly to that which was to throw a stain upon her memory, enduring as history itself. Sin is hideous in every form--but when it darkens the bright and beautiful of earth, like a cloud over the sun, we reproach it for its own blackness, and doubly for the brightness it conceals. As the misguided woman lay, with a hand pressed over her eyes, and one arm, but half divested of its jewels, flung out with a kind of desperate carelessness upon the counterpane, the murmur of an infant voice reached her from a neighboring apartment. She started up and tears gathered in her eyes. "Woe is me!" she exclaimed, "this mad passion makes me forgetful alike of prayer and child." Folding a dressing-gown about her, she entered the room whence the sound had come, and reappeared with an infant boy pressed to her bosom. After kissing him again and again with a sort of despairing fondness, she bore him to a recess where a small lamp of chased silver burned before a crucifix of the same metal, and an embroidered hassock was placed as if for devotion. Had she been left alone in the holy stillness of the night, with her lovely babe upon her bosom, and the touching symbol of our Saviour's death before her, the evil influence which was hurrying her on to ruin might have been counterbalanced; but as she knelt with the smiling babe lying on the hassock, her eyes fixed on the crucifix, and the guilty glow ebbing from her cheeks, the door softly opened, and the Earl of Bothwell stole into the chamber. Mary sprang to her feet as if to reprove the insolent intruder, but a sense of modesty, which in all her follies seemed never to have left her, succeeded to her indignation, if indeed she felt any. She glanced at her dishabille with a painful flush, and hastily seating herself, drew her uncovered feet, which had been hastily thrust into a pair of furred slippers, under the folds of her dressing gown, and then requested him to withdraw, in a voice which betrayed as much of encouragement as of reproof. Without even noticing her request, Bothwell lifted the boy from the hassock, and seating himself, addressed her in a low and gentle tone, which he knew well how to assume. The erring woman listened to the witchery of his voice, till the unnatural glow again died from her cheek, and she sat with her eyes fixed on his, as a beautiful bird yielding to the fascination of a serpent. "But thy wife," she said in a low irresolute tone, when Bothwell pressed for a reply to what he had been urging, "much as Mary may love--much as she may sacrifice, she cannot thrust a young and loving woman from a heart she loves and puts her faith in."