was
seldom seen at Court thereafter.

Even when in the following October, Mary lay at the point of death at
Jedburgh, Darnley came but to stay a day, and left her again without any
assurance that she would recover. But then the facts of her illness, and
how it had been contracted, were not such as to encourage kindness in
him, even had he been inclined to kindness.

Bothwell had taken three wounds in a Border affray some weeks before,
and Mary, hearing of this and that he lay in grievous case at Hermitage,
had ridden thither in her fond solicitude--a distance of thirty
miles--and back again in the same day, thus contracting a chill which
had brought her to the very gates of death.

Darnley had not only heard of this, but he had found Bothwell at
Jedburgh, whither he had been borne in a litter, when in his turn he had
heard of how it was with Mary; and Bothwell had treated him with more
than the contempt which all men now showed him, but which from none
could wound him so deeply as from this man whom rumour accounted Mary's
lover.

Matters between husband and wife were thus come to a pass in which they
could not continue, as all men saw, and as she herself confessed at
Craigrnillar, whither she repaired, still weak in body, towards the end
of November.

Over a great fire that blazed in a vast chamber of the castle she sat
sick at heart and shivering, for all that her wasted body was swathed in
a long cloak of deepest purple reversed with ermine. Her face was thin
and of a transparent pallor, her eyes great pools of wistfulness amid
the shadows which her illness had set about them.

"I do wish I could be dead!" she sighed.

Bothwell's eyes narrowed. He was leaning on the back of her tall chair,
a long, virile figure with a hawk-nosed, bearded face that was sternly
handsome. He thrust back the crisp dark hair that clustered about his
brow, and fetched a sigh.

"It was never my own death I wished when a man stood in my road to aught
I craved," he said, lowering his voice, for Maitland of Lethington--now
restored to his secretaryship--was writing at a table across the room,
and my Lord of Argyll was leaning over him.

She looked up at him suddenly, her eyes startled.

"What devil's counsel do you whisper?" she asked him. And when he would
have answered, she raised a hand. "No," she said. "Not that way."

"There is another," said Bothwell coolly. He moved, came round, and
stood squarely upon the hearth, his bac