It was midnight ere the reckless orgie broke up, when Moray, calm, cool, and smiling, bade his companions a placid ‘good night;’ while Rothes, flushed and boisterous, trolled off a ribald drinking-song; and Bothwell, in whom wine had been powerless to drown the stings of conscience, sought his solitary chamber with keen remorse and torturing self-reproach gnawing at his heart. CHAPTER XXX. ‘In solitude the sparks are struck that bid the world admire, Though heart and brain must scorch the while in self-consuming fire. In solitude the sufferer smiles, defiant of his doom, And Madness sits aloof and waits, and gibbers in the gloom. ’Tis dazzling work to weave a web from Fancy’s brightest dyes, And speed the task ungrudging all we have, and hope, and prize. But it must make the devils laugh, to mark how, day by day, The plague-spot widens out, and spreads, and eats it all away. In vain the unwilling rebel writhes, so loth defeat to own, And strives to pray, and turns away, and lays him down alone. Oh! better far to moan aloud, on earth and heaven to cry, Than like the panther in its lair, to grind his teeth and die. Then help me, brother! Help me! for thy heart is made like mine; The shaft that drains my life away is haply wing’d for thine. It is not good to stand alone, to scorn the rest, and dare; But two or three, like one must be, and God shall hear their prayer.’ Heated with wine, stung with jealousy, torn by conflicting feelings, Earl Bothwell paced the stone-floor of his bed-chamber, as a wild beast traverses to and fro between the sides of his cage. His step had the same noiseless elasticity, his air the same subdued ferocity, his eye the same lurid sparkle that seems struck from some quenchless fire within. If there are indeed hours at which the master-fiend is permitted to vex those human souls, who, for some wise purpose, are delivered like Job into his hand, the Lord Warden must have been that night a prey to the arch-enemy of our race. It needed but little addition to the frenzy of his mood to imagine a dusky shape, defining itself more and more distinctly in the gloom, stepping as he stepped, turning as he turned, whispering in his ear suggestions that curdled his very blood, while he pondered them, and yet were tinged with the strange fascination which all frantic expedients possess for despair. It takes a long apprenticeship to sorrow ere a man can bow his head in resignation and cease to struggle, nay, even to quiver under the lash: but he who has gained this faculty at the cost of anguished moments, none but himself and one besides can count, is indeed master of his fate.