Pride would not allow the enraged earl to confess his private reasons
for this vehement enmity against the Scottish chief. A conference
which he had held the preceding evening with Lord Mar, was the cause of
this augmented hatred; and, from that moment, the haughty Southron
vowed the destruction of Wallace, by open attack, or secret treachery.
Ambition, and the base counterfeit of love, those two master passions
in untempered minds, were the springs of this antipathy. The instant
in which he knew that the young creature whom at a distance he
discerned clinging around the Earl of Mar's neck in the streets of
Stirling, was the same Lady Helen on whose account Lord Soulis had
poured on him such undeserved invectives in Bothwell Castle; curious to
have a nearer view of one whose transcendent beauty he had often heard
celebrated by others, he ordered her to be immediately conveyed to his
apartments in the citadel.
On their first interview he was more struck by her personal charms than
he had ever been with any woman's, although few were so noted for
gallantry in the English court as himself. He could hardly understand
the nature of his feelings while discoursing with her.
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