"Care not for me, Alwyn," said the knight; "when Somerset was deaf
save to his own fears, I came back to die by my chieftain's side,
alas, too late! too late! Better now death than life! What kin,
kith, ambition, love, were to other men was Lord Warwick's smile to
me!"

Alwyn kindly respected his prisoner's honest emotion, and took
advantage of it to lead him away from the spot where he saw knights
and warriors thickest grouped, in soldier-like awe and sadness, round
the Hero-Brothers. He pushed through a humbler crowd of peasants and
citizens, and women with babes at their breast; and suddenly saw a
troop of timbrel-women dancing round a leafless tree, and chanting
some wild but mirthful and joyous doggerel.

"What obscene and ill-seasoned revelry is this?" said the trader to a
gaping yeoman.

"They are but dancing, poor girls, round the wicked wizard whom Friar
Bungey caused to be strangled, and his witch daughter."

A chill foreboding seized upon Alwyn: he darted forward, scattering
peasant and tymbestere with his yet bloody sword. His feet stumbled
against some broken fragments; it was the poor Eureka, shattered, at
last, for the sake of the diamond! Valueless to the great friar,
since the science of the owner could not pass to his executioner,--
valueless the mechanism and the invention, the labour and the genius;
but the superstition and the folly and the delusion had their value,
and the impostor who destroyed the engine clutched the jewel!

From the leafless tree was suspended the dead body of a man; beneath,