be well-nigh impossible to reach Carlisle, obtain an interview with Edward at such an unseasonable hour, and return to Berwick in sufficient time for the execution of his diabolical scheme.  He let the reins fall on his horse’s neck, to ponder, and finally made up his mind it was better to let things take their course, and the sentence of the prisoner proceed without interruption; a determination hastened by the thought that should he die under the torture, all the ignominy and misery of a public execution would be eluded.  The night was very dark and misty, the road in some parts passing through, woods and morasses, and the earl, too much engrossed with his own dark thoughts to attend to his path, lost the track and wandered round and round, instead of going forward.  This heightened not the amiability of his previous mood; but until dawn his efforts to retrace his steps or even discover where he was were useless.  The morning, however, enabled him to reach Berwick, which he did just as the crowds were pouring into the castle-yard, and the heavy toll of the bell announced the commencement of that fatal tragedy.  He hastily dismounted and mingled with the populace, they bore him onward through another postern to that by which the other crowds had impelled Gloucester.  Finding the space before them already occupied, these two human streams, of course, met and conjoined in the centre; and the two earls stood side by side.  Gloucester, as we have said, wholly unconscious of Buchan’s vicinity, and Buchan watching his anxious and sorrowful looks with the satisfaction of a fiend, revelling in his being thus hemmed in on all sides, and compelled to witness the execution of his friend.  He watched him closely as he spoke with the minstrel, but tried in vain to distinguish what they said.  He looked on the page too, and with some degree of wonder, though he believed it only mortal terror which made him look thus, natural in so young a child; but afterwards that look was only too fatally recalled.

Sleepless and sad had been that long night to another inmate of Berwick Castle, as well as to Nigel and his Agnes.  It was not till the dawn had broken that the Countess of Buchan had sunk into a deep though troubled slumber, for it was not till then the confused sounds of the workmen employed in erecting the scaffold had ceased.  She knew not for whom it was upraised, what noble friend and gallant patriot would there be sacrificed.  She would not, could not believe it was for Nigel; for when his name arose in her thoughts, it was shudderingly repelled, and with him came the thought of her child—­where, oh, where was she?—­what would be her fate?  The tolling of the bell awoke her from the brief trance of utter unconsciousness into which, from exhaustion, she had fallen.  She glanced once beneath her.  The crowds, the executioner at his post, the guard already round the scaffold, too truly told the hour was at hand, and though her heart turned sick with apprehension, and she felt as if to know the worst were preferable to the hour of suspense, she could not look again, and she would have sought the inner chamber, and endeavor to close both ears and eyes to all that was passing without, when the Earl of Berwick suddenly entered, and harshly commanded her to stir not from the cage.