All that could be done to calm, the queen’s perturbed spirits by way of amusement Sir Nigel did; but his task was not an easy one, and the rumor which about this time reached him that the Earls of Hereford and Lancaster, with a very large force, were rapidly advancing towards Aberdeenshire, did not lessen its difficulties.  He sought to keep the information as long as possible from all his female charge, although the appearance of many terrified villagers flying from their homes to the protection of the castle hardly enabled him to do so, and confirmed without doubt the truth of what he had heard.  Nigel felt the moment of peril was approaching, and he nerved both mind and frame to meet it.  The weak terrors of the queen and some of her train increased with every rumor, and, despite every persuasion of Sir Nigel, Seaton, and other brave and well-tried warriors, she rested not till a negotiation was entered into with the Earl of Ross to grant them a safe conduct through his lands, and permission to enter the sanctuary of St. Duthac.

Perplexed with many sad thoughts, Nigel Bruce was one day slowly traversing a long gallery leading to some uninhabited chambers in the west wing of the building; it was of different architecture, and ruder, heavier aspect than the remainder of the castle.  Tradition said that those rooms had been the original building inhabited by an ancestor of the line of Bruce, and the remainder had been gradually added to them; that some dark deed of blood had been there committed, and consequently they were generally kept locked, none of the vassals in the castle choosing to run the risk of meeting the spirits which they declared abode there.  We have before said that Nigel was not superstitious, though his mind being of a cast which, adopting and embodying the ideal, he was likely to be supposed such.  The particulars of the tradition he had never heard, and consequently it was always with a smile of disbelief he listened to the oft-repeated injunction not to walk at dusk in the western turret.  This warning came across him now, but his mind was far otherwise engrossed, too much so indeed for him even to give more than a casual glance to the rude portraits which hung on either side the gallery.

He mistrusted the Earl of Ross, and there came a fear upon his noble spirit that, in permitting the departure of the queen and her attendants, he might be liable to the censure of his sovereign, that he was failing in his trust; yet how was he to act, how put a restraint upon his charge?  Had he indeed believed that the defence of the castle would be successful, that he should be enabled to force the besiegers to raise the siege, he might perhaps have felt justified in restraining the queen—­but he did not feel this.  He had observed there were many discontented and seditious spirits in the castle, not indeed in the three hundred of his immediate followers; but what were they compared to the immense force now pouring