er lying on the heather in a cold and dreary
place.

She did not feel the cold, and she was too dreary within to be sensible
of the desolation without. How deserted she felt as she saw Rollo
walking away, quickening his pace to a run when he reached the down. It
might be said that she was without a hope in heaven or on earth, but
that passion always hopes for its own gratification--always expects it,
in defiance of all probability, and in opposition to all reason. This
is one chief mode in which the indulgence of any kind of passion is
corrupting. It injures the integrity of the faculties and the
truthfulness of the mind, inducing its victims to trust to chances
instead of likelihood, and to dwell upon extravagances till they become
incapable of seeing things as they are.

So Lady Carse now presently forgot that she was alone on a hill in a far
island of the Hebrides, with no means of getting away, and no chance of
letting any friend know that she was not buried long ago--and her
imagination was busy in London. She fancied herself there, and, if once
there, how she would accomplish her revenge. She imagined herself
talking to the minister, and repeating to him the things her husband had
written and said against himself and the royal family. She imagined
herself introduced to the king, and telling into his anxious ear the
tidings of the preparations made for driving him from the throne and
restoring the exiled family. She imagined the list made out of the
traitors to be punished, at the top of which she would put the names of
her own foes--her husband first, and Lord Lovat next. She imagined the
king's grateful command to her to accompany his messengers to Scotland,
that she might guide and help them to seize the offenders. She clasped
her hands behind her head in a kind of rapture when she pictured to
herself the party stealing a march upon her formal husband, presenting
themselves before him, and telling him what they came for--marking, and
showing him how they marked his deadly paleness, perhaps by making
courteous inquiries about his health. She feasted her fancy on scenes
in the presence of her old acquaintance, Duncan Forbes, when she would
distress him by driving home her charges against the friends of his
youth, and by appeals to his loyalty, which he could not resist. She
pictured to herself the trials and the sentences--and then the
executions--her slow driving through the streets in her coach in h