Desolate as the situation of the countess might perhaps appear, she found solace and delight in moulding the young minds of her children according to the pure and elevated cast of her own.  All the long-suppressed tenderness of her nature was lavished upon them, and on their innocent love she sought to rest the passionate yearnings of her own.  She taught them to be patriots, in the purest, most beautiful appropriation of the term,—­to spurn the yoke of the foreigner, and the oppressor, however light and flowery the links of that yoke might seem.  She could not bid them love and revere their father as she longed to do, but she taught them that where their duty to their country and their free and unchained king interfered not, in all things they must obey and serve their father, and seek to win his love.

Once only had the Countess of Buchan beheld the vision which had crossed her youth.  He had come, it seemed unconscious of his track, and asked hospitality for a night, evidently without knowing who was the owner of the castle; perhaps his thoughts were preoccupied, for a deep gloom was on his brow, and though he had started with evident pleasure when recognizing his beautiful hostess, the gloom speedily resumed ascendency.  It was but a few weeks after the fatal battle of Falkirk, and therefore Isabella felt there was cause enough for depression and uneasiness.  The graces of boyhood had given place to a finished manliness of deportment, a calmer expression of feature, denoting that years had changed and steadied the character, even as the form.  He then seemed as one laboring under painful and heavy thought, as one brooding over some mighty change within, as if some question of weighty import were struggling with recollections and visions of the past.  He had spoken little, evidently shrinking in pain from all reference to or information on the late engagement.  He tarried not long, departing with dawn next day, and they did not meet again.

And what had been the emotions of the countess? perhaps her heart had throbbed, and her cheek paled and flushed, at this unexpected meeting with one she had fervently prayed never to see again; but not one feeling obtained ascendency in that heart which she would have dreaded to unveil to the eye of her husband.  She did indeed feel that had her lot been cast otherwise, it must have been a happy one, but the thought was transient.  She was a wife, a mother, and in the happiness of her children, her youth, and all its joys and pangs, and dreams and hopes, were merged, to be recalled no more.

The task of instilling patriotic sentiments in the breast of her son had been insensibly aided by the countess’s independent position amid the retainers of Buchan.  This earldom had only been possessed by the family of Comyn since the latter years of the reign of William the Lion, passing into their family by the marriage of Margaret Countess of Buchan with Sir William Comyn, a knight of goodly favor and repute.