Brown was a soldier, and a brave one; but he was also a man, and at this moment his fears mastered his courage so completely that the cold drops burst out from every pore.  The idea of being dragged out of his miserable concealment by wretches whose trade was that of midnight murder, without weapons or the slightest means of defence, except entreaties, which would be only their sport, and cries for help, which could never reach other ear than their own; his safety entrusted to the precarious compassion of a being associated with these felons, and whose trade of rapine and imposture must have hardened her against every human feeling—­the bitterness of his emotions almost choked him.  He endeavoured to read in her withered and dark countenance, as the lamp threw its light upon her features, something that promised those feelings of compassion which females, even in their most degraded state, can seldom altogether smother.  There was no such touch of humanity about this woman.  The interest, whatever it was, that determined her in his favour arose not from the impulse of compassion, but from some internal, and probably capricious, association of feelings, to which he had no clue.  It rested, perhaps, on a fancied likeness, such as Lady Macbeth found to her father in the sleeping monarch.  Such were the reflections that passed in rapid succession through Brown’s mind as he gazed from his hiding-place upon this extraordinary personage.  Meantime the gang did not yet approach, and he was almost prompted to resume his original intention of attempting an escape from the hut, and cursed internally his own irresolution, which had consented to his being cooped up where he had neither room for resistance nor flight.

Meg Merrilies seemed equally on the watch.  She bent her ear to every sound that whistled round the old walls.  Then she turned again to the dead body, and found something new to arrange or alter in its position.  ‘He’s a bonny corpse,’ she muttered to herself, ‘and weel worth the streaking.’  And in this dismal occupation she appeared to feel a sort of professional pleasure, entering slowly into all the minutise, as if with the skill and feelings of a connoisseur.  A long, dark-coloured sea-cloak, which she dragged out of a corner, was disposed for a pall.  The face she left bare, after closing the mouth and eyes, and arranged the capes of the cloak so as to hide the bloody bandages, and give the body, as she muttered, ‘a mair decent appearance.’

At once three or four men, equally ruffians in appearance and dress, rushed into the hut.  ’Meg, ye limb of Satan, how dare you leave the door open?’ was the first salutation of the party.

’And wha ever heard of a door being barred when a man was in the dead-thraw? how d’ye think the spirit was to get awa through bolts and bars like thae?’

‘Is he dead, then?’ said one who went to the side of the couch to look at the body.