Affecting to share the
general anxiety respecting the failure of communications from the
north, she it was who suggested the propriety of sending some one of
peculiar trust to make inquiries. By covert insinuations, she easily
induced Ker to propose Bothwell to Wallace, and, on the very night that
her machinations had prevailed, to dispatch him on this embassy;
impatient, yet doubting and agitated, she went to declare herself to
the man for whom she had thus sunk herself in shame and falsehood.
Though Wallace heard the denunciation with which she left his presence,
yet he did not conceive it was more than the evanescent rage of
disappointed passion; and, anticipating persecutions rather from her
love than her revenge, he was relieved, and not alarmed, by the
intelligence that the Knight of the Green Plume had really taken his
departure. More delicate
of Lady Mar's honor than she was of her own, when he met Edwin at the
works, he silently acquiesced in his belief also, that their late
companion was gone with dispatches to the regent, who was now removed
to Stirling.
After frequent sallies from the garrison, in which the Southrons were
always beaten back with great loss, the lines of circumvallation were
at last finished, and Wallace hourly anticipated the surrender of the
enemy.
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