er 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
they made buy the bread they gave him by all sorts of harshness. The
result was that the child, proud and spiteful as a Douglas, and knowing,
although his fortune was inferior, that his birth was equal to his proud
relatives, had little by little changed his early gratitude into lasting
and profound hatred: for one used to say that among the Douglases there
was an age for loving, but that there was none for hating. It results
that, feeling his weakness and isolation, the child was self-contained
with strength beyond his years, and, humble and submissive in
appearance, only awaited the moment when, a grown-up young man, he could
leave Lochleven, and perhaps avenge himself for the proud protection of
those who dwelt there. But the feelings that we