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