A burst of hysterical weeping was the result, but it calmed and relieved the sufferer, until she could find words in which to offer her petition and tell her pitiful tale. Women are wonderfully patient of such affections in their own sex, and the harshest of them will be gentle and considerate with one of these outbreaks that they have agreed to call ‘nervous attacks.’ Much more so, kindly Mary Stuart; soothing her attendant like a child, she soon restored her to sufficient composure to make intelligible the boon she had all day been striving to entreat. What this was an hour or two would disclose. In the meantime, the Queen and her maiden sat whispering in the darkening twilight, till the shafts and pinnacles of the neighbouring cathedral loomed grim and fantastic in the shadows of nightfall, and the light in the sacristan’s window told that the time of vespers was already past. At the same hour, John Knox, riding steadily along the road to Edinburgh, was beguiling the gloomy journey with a proud recollection of his resistance to the Queen’s advances, sternly reminding his conscience that animosity to the Papists was a Christian’s duty, and that forgiveness was no Christian virtue to one of another faith. And Chastelâr in his dungeon was preparing for death by reflection on the pitiless beauty of her in whose face he would never look again. CHAPTER XXIII. ‘While hate itself is fain to shrink, Love freely ventures--lose or win-- And friendship shivers on the brink, Where love leaps boldly in.’