f all, my lord Shrewsbury himself--he
who had been her Grace's gaoler, until he proved too kind for
Elizabeth's taste--now appointed, with peculiar malice, to assist at her
execution. He looked pale and dejected as he rode past beneath the
window.

Yet all this time the supreme horror had been that the end was not
absolutely certain. All in Fotheringay were as convinced as men could
be, who had not seen the warrant nor heard it read, that Mr. Beale had
brought it with him on Sunday night; the priest, above all, from his
communications with Mr. Bourgoign, was morally certain that the terror
was come at last.... It was not until the last night of Mary's life on
earth was beginning to close in that John Merton came up to the parlour,
white and terrified, to tell him that he had been in his master's room
half an hour ago, and that Mr. Melville had come in to them, his face
all slobbered with tears, and had told him that he had but just come
from her Grace's rooms, and had heard with his own ears the sentence
read to her, and her gallant and noble answer.... He had bidden him to
go straight off to the priest, with a message from Mr. Bourgoign and
himself, to the effect that the execution was appointed for eight
o'clock next morning; and that he was to be at the gate of the castle
not later than three o'clock, if, by good fortune, he might be admitted
when the gates were opened at seven.

III

And now that the priest was in his place, he began again to think over
that answer of the Queen. The very words of it, indeed, he did not know
for a month or two later, when Mr. Bourgoign wrote to him at length; but
this, at least, he knew, that her Grace had said (and no man
contradicted her at that time) that she would shed her blood to-morrow
with all the happiness in the world, since it was for the cause of the
Catholic and Roman Church that she died. It was not for any plot that
she was to die: she professed again, kissing her Bible as she did so,
that she was utterly guiltless of any plot against her sister. She died
because she was of that Faith in which she had been born, and which
Elizabeth had repudiated. As for death, she did not fear it; she had
looked for it during all the eighteen years of her imprisonment.

It was at a martyrdom, then, that he was to assist.... He had known
that, without a doubt, ever since the day that Mary had declared her
innocence at Chartley. There had been no possibility of thinking
otherwise