Rock, isle, and ship seemed floating on its bosom, amid all the sparkling colours of the sun, till it sank behind the mountains, leaving a million of radiations shooting upward behind the dark peak of Dumiat. Then the Forth turned from gold to blue, and its shores from green to purple; and then, as the hills of Fife grew dark, the Lothian woods grew darker still, and the gentle star of evening rose above Corstorphine to replace, by its mild beauty, the brighter glories of the day that had passed. Of all this magnificent effect of scenery and of sunset, Jane saw nothing; for her eyes were turned back (as it were) within her heart, and she saw only her own thoughts. The events of the last few weeks seemed all a horrible dream--a dream from which she had yet to awaken. A chaos, incoherent and fantastic, like the time of a fever and delirium. Amid this chaos came forth the figure of Roland--Roland, who was ever uppermost in her thoughts. Where was he? What was he doing? Or what had been done with him since that frightful day when, under twenty weapons, she had seen him beaten down and slain, as she then thought, before her very eyes. She considered, then, the doom to be endured--the punishment by fire. She remembered the burning of Sir David Straitoun and of Father Norman Gourlay, two hapless Protestants, who, on the 27th of August, three years before, had suffered martyrdom at the Rood of Greenside, below the western brow of the Calton; and those who witnessed that frightful _auto-da-fé_, had described how like parchment scrolls the limbs of the victims shrivelled; how their stomachs burst and fell down among the hissing embers; and how the forky flames shot up between their scorched and blackened ribs, and were vomited forth at their open jaws and eyeless sockets, till even the morbid crowd, hardened as they were by the daily executions of that unhappy age, became sick and turned away with horror. She thought of these things; she grasped her temples and endeavoured to pray; but the terrors of a death so awful paralyzed her, and she could not collect her energies sufficiently to address even that God before whom she was so shortly to appear. All she had endured, and was then enduring, seemed trifles to the sufferings that were yet to come--the stake--the faggots! The strong chain that secured her wrists to each other, retaining them a yard apart, and that yet stronger fetter which secured her left ankle to the wall of her bed, holding her in childlike helplessness; the frequent entrance of Sanders Screws and his assistants, or the equally brutal warders, outraging and violating all her privacies by day and by night; the desertion of her friends; her hopelessness of rescue, of mercy, and of life, were all merged in the terrors of her coming execution. "Three days! three days! three days!--my God! Oh, my God!" she exclaimed, "only three days!"