Coming weary and excited from battle, on a day so strange that it adds to the strangeness of his mood, Macbeth hears the hags hail him with prophecy. The promise rankles in him. The seed scattered in us by the beings outside life comes to good or evil according to the sun in us. Macbeth, looking on the letter of the prophecy, thinks only of the letter of its fulfilment, till it becomes an obsession with him. Partial fulfilment of the prophecy convinces him that all will be fulfilled. The belief that the veil over the future has been lifted for him gives him the recklessness of one bound in the knots of fate. So often, the thought that the soul is in a trap, playing out something planned of old, makes man take the frantic way, when the smallest belief in life would lead to peace. This thought passes through his mind. Then fear that it is all a contriving of the devils makes him put it manfully from his mind. The talk about the Cawdor whose place he holds is a thrust to him. That Cawdor was a traitor who has been put to death for treachery. The king had an "absolute trust" in him; but there is no judging by appearances. This glimpse of the ugliness of treachery makes Macbeth for an instant free of all temptation to it. Then a word stabs him again to the knowledge that if he take no step the king's young son will be king after Duncan. Why should the boy rule? From this point he goes forward, full of all the devils of indecision, but inclining towards righteousness, till his wife, girding and railing at him with definite aim while all his powers are in mutiny, drives him to the act of murder. The story of the double treachery of the killing of a king, who is also a guest, is so written that we do not feel horror so much as an unbearable pity for Macbeth's mind. The horror is felt later, when it is made plain that the treachery does not end with that old man on the bed, but proceeds in a spreading growth of murder till the man who fought so knightly at Fife is the haunted awful figure who goes ghastly, killing men, women and little children, till Scotland is like a grave. At the end, the "worthy gentleman," "noble Macbeth," having fallen from depth to depth of degradation, is old, hag-haunted, sick at heart, and weary. He has no friends. He knows himself silently cursed by every one in his kingdom. His queen is haunted. There is a curse upon the pair of them. The birds of murder have come to roost. All that supports him is his trust in his reading of the words of the hags. He knows himself secure. "And you all know security Is mortal's chiefest enemy," He has supped full with horrors. His bloody base mind is all a blur with gore. But he is resolute in evil still. At the end he sees too late that he has been tricked by-- "the equivocation of the fiend That lies like truth."