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.