He paused.
"Tempted to what ?" asked De Warenne.
"To a Brutus mode of ridding the state of an enemy." "That might be noble in a Roman citizen," returned De Warenne, "which would be villainous in an English lord, treated as you have been by a generous victor, not the usurper of any country's liberties, but rather a Brutus in defense of his own.

Which man of us all, from the general to the meanest follower in our camps, has he injured ?" Lord Aymer frowned.

"Did he not expose me, threaten me with an ignominious death, on the walls of Stirling ?" "But was it before he saw the Earl of Mar, with his hapless family, brought, with halters on their necks, to be suspended from this very tower?
Ah! what a tale has the lovely countess told me of that direful scene! What he then did was to check the sanguinary Cressingham from imbruiting his hands in the blood of female and infant innocence." "I care not," cried De Valence, "what are or are not the offenses of this domineering Wallace, but I hate him; and my respect for his advocates cannot but correspond with that feeling." As he spoke, that he might not be further molested by the arguments of De Warenne, he abruptly turned away, and left the battlements.
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.