In truth, while the borderer spoke, Maxwell made his appearance on the track that led to Hermitage, exchanging, as soon as he spied the earl and his henchman, for a brisk hand-gallop the more steady pace at which he had been prosecuting his journey. The greeting between the kinsmen was sufficiently cordial, between ‘Dick-o’-the-Cleugh’ and the new arrival, of the most boisterous and demonstrative nature. The rough borderer would have been at a loss to explain to himself why he entertained so warm a regard for Walter Maxwell. As the three rode slowly on together towards Hermitage, the emissary thought it a good time to broach the business which had been entrusted to him by his sovereign. Slowly pacing over the open moor, where everything breathed peace and repose, where not a tuft of heather stirred in the soft still air, and the call of a moor-fowl or the dull flap of a heron’s wing alone broke the surrounding silence; where the softened gleams of a winter sun came down in sheets of mellowed light, and heaven above and earth below seemed wrapped in security and content, Maxwell poured into no inattentive ears the tale that was rousing all the fiercest passions of our nature in the heart of one of his listeners. Bothwell, after bidding him a hearty welcome to the border, heard him patiently and in silence, with an enforced composure that was more ominous of subsequent evil than would have been the wildest outbreak of that wrath which he suppressed with such an effort. His jaded horse, indeed, felt his rider’s thighs tightening on him like a vice as the tale proceeded, and exerted himself gallantly to meet the unusual pressure; but only a very close observer could have marked, by the clenched jaw, the widened nostril, and dilated eye, that every word was driving its sting deeper and deeper, poisoned and festering, into the warden’s heart. Once indeed when a brighter gleam of sunshine than ordinary lighted up the moor, and the old towers of Hermitage coming into view imparted a picturesque and even beautiful aspect to the scene, Bothwell looked up to heaven as if in helpless expostulation with the mocking sky, and then in one bitter and defiant smile, took leave for ever of those nobler and better feelings which had hitherto redeemed his character from utter reprobation. It was at this moment that Maxwell urged his kinsman to forward him at once upon his journey. ‘I will but break bread with you, my lord,’ said he, ‘and so with a fresh horse speed my way to the southward once more; mine errand brooks no delay, and he that goes wooing for a queen must not let the grass grow under his feet while he is about it.’