then hastily retired with both, to the hovel where Wallace had found
her. It was a shepherd's hut, from which the desolation of the times
having long ago driven away its former inhabitant, she had hoped that
in so lonely an obscurity, she might have performed without notice, a
chieftain's rites, to the remains of the murdered lord of the very
lands on which she wept him. These over, she meant he should be
interred in secret by the fathers of a neighboring church, which he had
once richly endowed. With these intentions, she and her sister were
chanting over him the sad dirge of their country, when Sir Roger
Kirkpatrick burst open the door. "Ah!" cried she, as she closed the
dismal narrative; "though two lonely women were all they had left of
the lately thronged household of Sir Ronald Crawford, to raise the last
lament over his revered body, yet in that and midnight hour, our
earthly voices were not alone; the wakeful spirits of his daughters,
hovered in the air, and joined the deep coronach!"

Wallace sighed heavily as he looked on the animated face of the aged
mourner. Attachment to the venerable dead seemed to have inspired her
with thoughts beyond her station; but the heart is an able teacher, and
he saw that true affection speaks but one language.

As her ardent eyes withdrew from their heavenward gaze, they fell upon
the shrouded face of her master. A napkin concealed the wound of
decapitation. "Chiefs," cried she, in a burst of recollection, "ye
have not seen all the cruelty of these murderers!" At these words she
suddenly withdrew the linen, and lifting up the pale head, held it
wofully toward Wallace. "Here," cried she, "once more kiss these lips!
They have often kissed yours, when you were a babe; and as insensible
to his love, as he is now to your sorrow."