and how fatal am I likely to prove to my affectionate parent,
and to any one with whom I might ally my unhappy fortunes!"

"Be yet of good cheer, my daughter," said the monk; "there is comfort
for thee even in this extremity of apparent distress. Ramorny is a
villain, and abuses the ear of his patron. The Prince is unhappily a
dissipated and idle youth; but, unless my grey hairs have been strangely
imposed on, his character is beginning to alter. He hath been awakened
to Ramorny's baseness, and deeply regrets having followed his evil
advice. I believe, nay, I am well convinced, that his passion for you
has assumed a nobler and purer character, and that the lessons he has
heard from me on the corruptions of the church and of the times will, if
enforced from your lips, sink deeply into his heart, and perhaps produce
fruits for the world to wonder as well as rejoice at. Old prophecies
have said that Rome shall fall by the speech of a woman."

"These are dreams, father," said Catharine--"the visions of one whose
thoughts are too much on better things to admit his thinking justly
upon the ordinary affairs of Perth. When we have looked long at the sun,
everything else can only be seen indistinctly."

"Thou art over hasty, my daughter," said Clement, "and thou shalt be
convinced of it. The prospects which I am to open to thee were unfit to
be exposed to one of a less firm sense of virtue, or a more ambitious
temper. Perhaps it is not fit that, even to you, I should display them;
but my confidence is strong in thy wisdom and thy principles. Know,
then, that there is much chance that the Church of Rome will dissolve
the union which she has herself formed, and release the Duke of Rothsay
from his marriage with Marjory Douglas."

Here he paused.

"And if the church hath power and will to do this," replied the maiden,
"what influence can the divorce of the Duke from his wife produce on the
fortunes of Catharine Glover?"

She looked at the priest anxiously as she spoke, and he had some
apparent difficulty in framing his reply, for he looked on the ground
while he answered her.

"What did beauty do for Catharine Logie? Unless our fathers have told us
falsely, it raised her to share the throne of David Bruce."

"Did she live happy or die regretted, good father?" asked Catharine, in
the same calm and steady tone.

"She formed her alliance from temporal, and perhaps criminal, ambition,"
replied Father Clement; "and she found