Something in his tone so tender, so hopeless, and so respectful, touched the girl to the heart. She laid her hand once more in his, and he wrung it hard in his own strong fingers, but did not even presume to put it to his lips. Only as she turned away to join the Queen, a low stifled sob smote upon her ear, and looking back she beheld the borderer standing as if spell-bound on the spot where she had left him. The next moment he was in the saddle, and as he passed her moving up the street after the others, he detached the sprig of witch-elm from his morion and cast it at her feet ere he galloped off. Mary Seton’s eyes filled with tears while she picked it up, and Dick’s honest heart would have leapt with joy, notwithstanding his forebodings, could he have seen her hide it away carefully and tenderly in her bosom. When she rejoined the royal party, Riccio’s sharp countenance wore a look of curiosity, for his quick eye detected that she had been weeping; but the Queen called her to her side, and soothed and caressed her, speaking in gentle, loving tones, like a mother to a child. CHAPTER XXXVI. ‘Oh! Espérance! Hope on! The fight Is never lost while fight we may; At home the hearth is shining bright, Though yet unseen along the way: And the darkest hour of all the night Is that which brings us day.’ Long weeks of solitary confinement in a dungeon, dark and damp and dismal, nourished on bread and water, and cheered only by the periodical visits of an asthmatic jailer, appointed to that post because fit for nothing else, would destroy the courage of most men, as it would sap their bodily health and vigour. Walter Maxwell had need of all his strength of mind, all his natural qualities of bravery and endurance, to resist the influence of his imprisonment, ere he had spent many weeks in the strong room of Leslie House. This place of confinement, paved and walled with stone, lighted by but one window, narrow and iron-barred, communicated with a winding staircase, and a long gloomy subterranean passage terminating in a wicket, which opened on a pleasaunce and flower-garden. Prisoners might thus be smuggled in or out of the Leslies’ stronghold without exciting observation; and unless the Lord of Rothes was much belied, this facility of ingress was used for a variety of purposes, foreign to its original object. On summer evenings, ’tis said, the flutter of a farthingale might sometimes be seen emerging from its dark recesses, while lighter steps and merrier voices than were likely to belong to a permanent prisoner echoed in the damp underground passage leading in and out of Leslie House. Under these circumstances, bars were sometimes left undrawn and locks unturned, nor was Walter ignorant of the occasional negligence in which lay his only chance of escape.