Mr. Edwards's visits were as late, as early, and as frequent as usage would permit. His ingenuity was constantly employed; his vigilance on the ceaseless watch; but the night of Saturday wore away, and the morning of Sunday dawned, and no opportunity of making an attempt at escape affording the slightest prospect of success, had offered. During the long, wretched day of suspense and agony nothing could be done. Another interview, if possible more heart-rending than the last, had been granted to Lady Arden, and evening was again approaching, while no accounts had yet come from Lord Darlingford. At length a letter did arrive by express. It did not say, in so many words, that he had failed in his mission; it even spoke of continued efforts: but it strenuously recommended that the escape should be attempted at all hazards. Such a letter, to the feelings of the parties interested, amounted to a repetition of the sentence of condemnation. There was now but the one solitary hope left for every thought to cling around; while it appeared to be reduced in probability to the straw at which the drowning man catches: for what the two preceding nights had offered no opportunity of accomplishing, there seemed but little chance should be compassed on this last remaining one. The evening, too, was already gone, and the lock-up completed; nay, the night itself was on the wane; so that now, all seemed to depend on Mr. Edwards's early visit to the prison, the one last hour before dawn, on the thus fast approaching morning of the Monday, the day fixed for the execution. Some hours after midnight, a desperate storm of thunder, hail and rain came on. And strange it was, that the roaring elements should thus seem, as it were, to sanction the legendary belief, already mentioned, as prevalent among the ignorant persons of the neighbourhood, that all events disastrous to a member of the Arden family were accompanied, or preceded, by terrible tempests. And, however irrational such an idea, many inhabitants of Arden, as they lay in their beds that awful night, and were suddenly awakened by the thunder, ere they slept again, shuddered involuntarily at the thought, that the old superstition was being at the very moment fulfilled.