The earl and his brother were incarcerated in the lower chamber of the High Keep called David's Tower, which rose next in order eastward from the banqueting-hall, following the line of the battlements.

Beneath, the rock on which the castle was built fell away towards the Nor' Loch in a precipice so steep that no descent was to be thought of—and this indeed was the chief defence of the prison, for the window of the chamber was large and opened easily according to the French fashion.

"I pray that you permit my young knight, Sir Sholto MacKim, to accompany me," said the Earl to the officer who conducted them to their prison-house.

"I have no orders concerning him," said the man, gruffly, but nevertheless permitted Sholto to enter after the Earl and his brother.

The chamber was bare save for a prie-dieu in the angle of the wall, at which the Douglas looked with a strange smile upon his face.

"Right À propos," said he; "they have need of religion in this house of traitors."

David Douglas went to the window-seat of low stone, and bent his head into his hands. He was but a boy and life was sweet to him, for he had just begun to taste the apple and to dream of the forbidden fruit. He held his head down and was silent a space. Then suddenly he sobbed aloud with a quick, gasping noise, startling enough in that still place.

"For God's dear sake, David laddie," said his brother, going over to him, placing his hand upon his shoulder, "be silent. They will think that we are afraid."

The boy stilled himself instantly at the word, and looked up at his brother with a pale sort of smile.

"No, William, I am not afraid, and if indeed we must die I will not disgrace you. Be never feared of that. Yet I thought on our mother's loneliness. She will miss me sore, for she fleeched and pled with me not to come, yet I would not listen to her."

Sholto stood by the door, erect as if on duty at Thrieve.

"Come and sit with us," said the Earl William kindly to him, "we are no more master and servant, earl and esquire. We are but three youths that are to die together, and the axe's edge levels all. You, Sholto, are in some good chance to live the longest of the three by some half score of minutes. I am glad I made you a knight on the field of honour, Sir Sholto, for then they cannot hang you to a bough, like a varlet caught stealing the King's venison."

Sholto slowly came over to the window-seat and stood there respectfully as before, with his arms straight at his side, feeling more than anything else the lack of his sword-hilt to set his right hand upon.

"Nay, but do as I bid you," said the Earl, looking up at him; "sit down, Sholto."

And Sholto sat on the window-seat and looked forth upon the lights leaping out one after another down among the crowded gables of the town as this and that burgher lit lamp or lantern at the nearing of the hour of supper.

Far away over the shore-lands the narrow strip of the Forth showed amethystine and mysterious, and farther out still the coast of Fife lay in a sort of opaline haze.

"I wonder," said William Douglas, after a long pause, "what they have done with our good lads. Had they been taken or perished we had surely heard more noise, I warrant. Two score lads of Galloway would not give up their arms without a tulzie for it."

"They might induce them to leave them behind, when they went out to take their pleasures among the maids of the Lawnmarket," said Sholto.

"Not their swords," said the Earl, "it needed all your lord's commands to make yours quit your side. I warrant these fellows will give an excellent account of themselves."

Presently the night fell darker, and a smurr of rain drifted over from the edges of Pentland, mostly passing high above, but with lower fringes that dragged, as it were, on the Castle Rock and the Hill of Calton.

The three young men were still silently looking out when suddenly from the darkness underneath there came a low voice.

"'Ware window!" it said, "stand back there above."

To Sholto the words sounded curiously familiar, and almost without thinking what he did, he seized the Earl and his brother and dragged them away from the wide space of the lattice, which opened into the summer's night.

"'Ware window!" came again the cautious voice from far below. Sholto heard the whistle and "spat" of an arrow against the wall without. It must have fallen again, for the voice 'came a third time—"'Ware window!"

And on this occasion the archer was successful, guided doubtless by the illumination of the lantern the guard had hung on a nail, and whose flicker would outline the lattice faintly against the darkness of the wall.

An arrow entered with a soft hiss. It struck beyond them with a click, and its iron point tinkled on the floor, the plaster of the opposite wall not holding it.

Sholto scrambled about the floor on hands and knees till he found it. It was a common archer's arrow. A cord was fastened about it, and a note stuck in the slit along with the feather.

"It is my brother Laurence," whispered Sholto. "I warrant he is beneath with a rope and a posse of stout fellows. We shall escape them yet."

But even as he raised the letter to read it by the faint blue flicker of the lantern, there came a cry of pain from within the castle. It was a woman's voice that cried, and at the sound of pleading speech in some chamber above them, William Douglas started to his feet.

The words were clear enough, but in a language not understood by Sholto MacKim. They seemed intelligible enough, however, to the Earl.

"I knew it," he cried; "the false hounds have imprisoned her also. It is Sybilla's voice. God in heaven—they are torturing her!"

He ran to the door and shook it vehemently.

"Ho! Without there!" he cried imperiously, as if in his own Castle at Thrieve.

But no one paid any attention to his shouts, and presently the woman's voice died down to a slow sobbing which was quite audible in the room beneath, where the three young men listened.

"What did she say?" asked David, presently, of his brother, who still stood with his ear to the door.

The Earl first made a gesture commanding silence, and then, hearing nothing more, he came slowly over to the window. "It is the Lady Sybilla," he said, in a voice which revealed his deep emotion. "She said, in the French language, 'You shall not kill him. You shall not! He trusted me and he shall not die.'"

Meanwhile Sholto, knowing that there was no time to lose, had been drawing in the cord, which presently thickened into a rope stout enough to support the weight of a light and active youth such as any of the three young men imprisoned in David's Tower.

But the sound of the woman's tears had thrown the Earl into an excitement so extreme that he hammered on the great bolt-studded door with his bare clenched hands, and cried aloud to the Chancellor and Livingston, commanding them to open to him. His first calmness seemed completely broken up.

Meanwhile Sholto, his whole soul bent on the cord which gave the unseen Douglases a chance of saving the lives of their masters, had drawn thirty yards of stout rope into the room. He fixed it by a double knot, first to a ring which was let into the wall, and afterwards to the massive handle of the door itself.

"Now, my lord," he whispered, as he finished, "be pleased to go first. Our lads are beneath, and in the shaking of a cow's tail we shall be safe in the midst of them."

The Earl held up his hand with the quick imperative motion he used to command silence. The sound of the woman's voice came again from above, now quick and high, like one who makes an agonised petition, and now in tones lower that seemed broken with sobs and lamentations.

At first William Douglas did not appear to comprehend the meaning of Sholto's words, being so bent on his listening. But when the young captain of the guard again reminded him that the time of their chances for relief was quickly passing, and that the soldiers of the Chancellor might come at any moment to lead them to their doom, the Earl broke out upon him in sudden anger.

"For what crawling thing do you take me, Sholto MacKim?" he cried; "I will not leave this place till I know what they have done with her. She trusted me, and shall I prove a recreant? I would have you know that I am William, Earl of Douglas, and fear not the face of any Crichton that ever breathed. Ho—there—without!" and again he shook the door with ineffectual anger.

His only answer was the sound of that beseeching woman's voice, and the measured tread of the sentry, whose partisan they could see flashing in the lamplight through the narrow barred wicket, as he turned in front of their door.

And it was now all in vain that Sholto pled with his master. To every argument Lord Douglas replied, "I cannot go—it consorts not with mine honour to leave this castle so long as the Lady Sybilla is in their hands."

Sholto told him how they could now escape, and in a week would raise the whole of the south, returning to the siege of the castle and the destruction of the traitors Crichton and Livingston. But even to this the Earl had his answer.

"What—flee like a coward and leave this girl, who has loved and trusted me, defenceless in their hands! You yourself have heard her weeping. I tell you I cannot go—I will not go. Let David and you escape! My place is here, and neither snivelling Crichton nor that backstairs lap-dog Livingston shall say that they took the Earl of Douglas, and that he fled from them under cloud of night."

David Douglas had been standing by hopefully while Sholto tied the rope to the rings. At his brother's words he sat down again. William of Douglas turned about upon him.

"Go, David, I bid you. Escape, and if aught happen to me, fail not to make the traitors pay dearly for it."

But David Douglas sat still and answered not. Then Sholto, desperate of success with his master, approached David, and with gentle force would have compelled him to the window. But, at the first touch of his hand, the boy thrust him away, striking him fiercely upon the shoulder.

"Hands off!" he cried, "I also am a Douglas and no craven. I will abide by my brother to the end."

"No, my David," said the Earl, turning for a moment from the door where he had been again listening, "you shall not stay! You are the hope of our house. My mother would fret to death if aught happened to you. This is not a matter which concerns you. Go, I bid you. On me it lies, and if I must pay the reckoning, why at least only I drank the wine."

"I will not;" cried the boy; "I tell you I will bide where my brother bides and his fate shall be mine."

Then Sholto, well nigh frantic with apprehension and disappointment, went to the window and leaned out, gripping the sill with his hands.

"They will not leave the castle," he whispered as loud as he dared; "the Earl will not escape while the Lady Sybilla remains a prisoner within."

"God in heaven!" cried a stern voice from below which made Sholto start, "we shall be broken first and last upon that woman. Would to God I had slain her with my hand! Tell the Earl that if he will not come to those that wait for him underneath the tower, I, Malise MacKim, will come and fetch him like a child in my arms, even as I did from under the pine trees at Loch Roan."

And as he spoke the strain of the rope and its swaying over the window-sill proclaimed that the mighty form of the master armourer was even then on the way upwards towards the dungeon of his chief.

"Go back, I command you, Malise MacKim," he said, "go back instantly. I have made up my mind. I will not escape from the Castle of Edinburgh this night."

But Malise answered not a word, only pulled more desperately on the rope, till the sound of his labouring breath and grasping palms could be heard from side to side of the chamber.

The Earl leaned further out.

"Malise," he said, calm and clear, "you see this knife. I would not have your blood on my hands. You have been a good and faithful servant to our house. But, by the oath of a Douglas, if you come one foot farther, I will cut the rope and you shall be dashed in pieces beneath."

The master armourer stopped—not with any fear of death upon him, but lest a stroke of his master's dirk should destroy their well-arranged mode of escape.

"O Earl William, my dear lord, hear me," he said in a gasping voice, still hanging perilously between earth and heaven. "If I have indeed been a faithful servant, I beseech you come with me—for the sake of the house of Douglas and of your mother, a widow and alone."

"Go down, Malise MacKim," said the Earl, more gently; "I will speak with you only at the rope's foot."

So very unwillingly Malise went back.

"Now," said the Earl, "hearken—this will I do and no other. I will remain here and abide that which shall befall me, as is the will of God. I am bound by a tie that I cannot break. What life is to another, honour and his word must be to a Douglas. But I send your son Sholto to you. I bid him ride fast to Galloway and bring all that are faithful with speed here to Edinburgh. Go also into Douglasdale and tell my cousin William of Avondale—and if he is too late to save, I know well he will avenge me."

"O William Douglas, if indeed ye will neither fleech nor drive, I pray you for the sake of the great house to send your brother David, that the Douglases of the Black be not cut off root and branch. Remember, your mother is sore set on the lad."

"I will not go," cried David, as he heard this; "by the saints I will stand by my brother's shoulder, though I be but a boy! I will not go so much as a step, and if by force ye stir me I will cry for the guard!"

By this time the young David was leaning half out of the window, and almost shouting out his words down to the unseen Douglases beneath.

"Go, Sholto," said the Earl, setting his hand on his squire's shoulder. "You alone can ride to Galloway without drawing rein. Go swiftly and bring back every true lad that can whang bow, or gar sword-iron whistle. The Douglas must drie the Douglas weird. I would have made you a great man, Sir Sholto, but if you get a new master, he will surely do that which I had not time to perform."

"Come, Sholto," said his father, "there is a horse at the outer port. I fear the Crichton's men are warned. As it is we shall have to fight for it."

Sholto still hesitated, divided between obedience and grief.

"Sholto MacKim," said the Earl, "if indeed you owe me aught of love or service, go and do that thing which I have laid upon you. Bear a courteous greeting from me to your sweetheart Maud, and a kiss to our Maid Margaret. And now haste you and begone!"

Sholto bent a moment on his knee and kissed the hand of his young master. His voice was choked with sobs. The Earl patted him on the shoulder. "Dinna greet, laddie," he said, in the kindly country speech which comes so meltingly to all Galloway folk in times of distress, gentle and simple alike, "dinna greet. If one Douglas fall in the breach, there stands ever a better behind him."

"But never one like you, my lord, my lord!" said Sholto.

The Earl raised him gently, led him to the window, and himself steadied the rope by which his squire was to descend.

"Go!" he said; "honour keeps the Douglas here, and his brother bides with him—since not otherwise it may be. But the honour of obedience sends Sholto MacKim to the work that is given him!"

Then, after the captain of his guard had gone out into the dark and disappeared down the rope, the Earl only waited till the tension slackened before stooping and cutting the cord at the point of juncture with the iron ring.

"And now, Davie lad," he said, setting an arm about his brother's neck, "there are but you and me for it, and I think a bit prayer would not harm either of us."

So the two young lads, being about to die, kneeled down together before the cross of Him who was betrayed with a kiss.