pied, 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.

"It is your sovereign's will, madam, that you witness the fate of the
traitor so daring in your cause," he said, as with a stern grasp he
forced her to the grating and retained his hold upon her arm; "that you
may behold in his deserved fate the type of that which will at length
befall the yet blacker traitor of his name. It is fitting so loyal a
patriot as thyself should look on a patriot's fate, and profit thereby."

"Aye, learn how a patriot can die--how, when his lif