While her thoughts thus followed each other, she unconsciously darted looks on Helen, which, if an evil eye had any bewitching power, would have withered all her beauties. At one of these portentous moments, the glad eyes of Helen met her glance. She started with horror. It made her remember how she had been betrayed, and all that she had suffered from Soulis. But she could not forget that she had also been rescued; and with that blessed recollection, the image of her preserver rose before her. At this gentle idea, her alarmed countenance took a softer expression; and, tenderly sighing, she turned to her father's question of "How she came to be with Lady Ruthven, when he had been taught by Lord Andrew to believe her safe at St. Fillan's?" "Yes," cried Murray, throwing herself on a seat beside her, "I found in your letter to Sir William Wallace, that you had been betrayed from your asylum by some traitor Scot; and but for the fullness of my joy at our present meeting, I should have inquired the name of the villian!" Lady Mar felt a deadly sickness at her heart, on hearing that Sir William Wallace was already so far acquainted with her daughter as to have received a letter from her; and in amazed despair, she prepared to listen to what she expected would bring a death-stroke to her hopes. They had met--but how?--where? They wrote to each other. Then, far indeed had proceeded that communication of hearts, which was now the aim of her life--and she was undone! Helen glanced at the face of Lady mar, and observing its changes, regarded them as corroborations of her having been the betrayer. "If conscience disturbs you thus," thought Helen, "let it rend your heart, and perhaps remorse may follow!" As the tide of success seemed so full for the patriot Scots, Helen no longer feared that her cousin would rashly seek a precarious vengeance on the traitor Soulis, when he might probably soon have an opportunity of making it certain at the head of an army. She therefore commenced her narrative from the time of Murray's leaving her at the priory, and continued it to the hour in which she had met her father, a prisoner in the streets of Stirling. As she proceeded, the indignation of the earl and of Murray against Soulis became vehement. The nephew was full of immediate personal revenge. But the father, with arguments similar to those which had suggested themselves to his daughter, calmed the lover's rage, for Murray now felt that fire as well as a kinsman's; and reseated himself with repressed, though burning resentment, to listen to the remainder of her relation. The quaking conscience of Lady mar did indeed vary her cheeks with a thousand dyes, when, as Helen repeated part of her conversation with Macgregor's wife, Murray abruptly said, "Surely that woman could name the traitor who betrayed us into the hands of our enemies! Did she not hint it?"