Such, however, was far from the condition of the tameless border-lord. He could have fought, struggled, died with the fiercest champion that ever set his teeth in the grim smile of a death-grapple; but the Hepburn blood was not the stuff of which martyrs are made, and the fiercest scion of all the bold, bad men that constituted the pride of his line, was now, so to speak, like some demoniac of antiquity, wrestling and striving against himself, torn, and rent, and infuriated by the possessing spirit, which refused to be exorcised and come out of him. That night in his lonely room at Hermitage, Bothwell learnt many new and strange things, never to be forgotten whilst he had life. Depths of guilt, into which, heretofore, he would not have dared to look, were now opened up to him, and there was seduction in the very immensity of the abyss. Crimes, dazzling from their boldness, now seemed feasible, nay, almost justifiable, and entranced him by the reckless daring with which they must be carried out. He had been dreaming hitherto a soft sweet dream for years. He was awake now, broad awake, and the vision should become reality, or he would never dream again. He had been cozened long enough! What? The game was not yet played out. Turn and turn about, fair dame! And it was Bothwell’s turn now! He laughed a low hissing laugh within his beard, and then stopped, startling in his walk, for it seemed to him that the laugh was echoed by something in the room, and that the shape was close to his ear now, whispering, whispering, one continuous stream of upbraiding, and persuasion, and reproach, with maddening promise and stinging sarcasm, and here and there a devilish scoff. But these paroxysms wear themselves out. By degrees the earl became calmer; by degrees he recalled the past and reviewed the present, and looked steadily on the future. The whirl of contending passions passed away to make room for a stern and gloomy resolve far more dangerous, and the molten stream of thought that had seared his brain, cooled down into the settled determination of the man.