CHAPTER V.
Lanark Castle.
The women, and the men who age withheld from so desperate an enterprise, now thronged around Halbert, to ask a circumstantial account of the disaster which had filled all with so much horror.
Many tears followed his recital; not one of his auditors was an indifferent listener; all had individually or in persons dear to them, partaken of the tender Marion's benevolence.

Their sick beds had been comforted by her charity; her voice had often administered consolation to their sorrows; her hand had smoothed their pillows, and placed the crucifix before their dying eyes.

Some had recovered to bless her, and some had departed to record her virtues in heaven.
"Ah! is she gone ?" cried a young woman, raising her face, covered with tears, from the bosom of her infant; "is the loveliest lady that ever the sun shone upon, cold in the grave?
Alas, for me! she it was that gave me the roof under which my baby was born; she it was who, when the Southron soldiers slew my father, and drove us from our home in Ayrshire, gave to my old mother, and my then wounded husband, our cottage by the burnside.

Ah! well can I spare him now to avenge her murder." The night being far advanced, Halbert retired, at the invitation of this young woman, to repose on the heather-bed of her husband who was now absent with Wallace.

The rest of the peasantry withdrew to their coverts, while she and some other women, whose anxieties would not allow them to sleep, sat at the cavern's mouth watching the slowly moving hours.
The objects of their fond and fervent prayers, Wallace and his little army, were rapidly pursuing their march.