which fell on Lord William Douglas of Lochleven, did not meet with any
resistance on his part. However, in spite of this direct protection,
that James V preserved for her all his life, Lady Douglas could never
forget that she had fingered higher fortune; moreover, she had a hatred
for the one who, according to herself, had usurped her place, and poor
Mary had naturally inherited the profound animosity that Lady Douglas
bore to her mother, which had already come to light in the few words that
the two women had exchanged. Besides, in ageing, whether from repentance
for her errors or from hypocrisy, Lady Douglas had become a prude and a
puritan; so that at this time she united with the natural acrimony of her
character all the stiffness of the new religion she had adopted.

William Douglas, who was the eldest son of Lord Lochleven, on his
mother's side half-brother of Murray, was a man of from thirty-five to
thirty-six years of age, athletic, with hard and strongly pronounced
features, red-haired like all the younger branch, and who had inherited
that paternal hatred that for a century the Douglases cherished against
the Stuarts, and which was shown by so many plots, rebellions, and
assassinations. According as fortune had favoured or deserted Murray,
William Douglas had seen the rays of the fraternal star draw near or away
from him; he had then felt that he was living in another's life, and was
devoted, body and soul, to him who was his cause of greatness or of
abasement. Mary's fall, which must necessarily raise Murray, was thus a
source of joy for him, and the Confederate lords could not have chosen
better than in confiding the safe-keeping of their prisoner to the
instinctive spite of Lady Douglas and to the intelligent hatred of her
son.

As to Little Douglas, he was, as we have said, a child of twelve, for
some months an orphan, whom the Lochlevens had taken charge of, and whom