ar in language and purport.

That afternoon the Duke sent for the Bishop of Ypres, The prelate arrived
at dusk. As soon as he presented himself, Alva informed him of the
sentence which had just been pronounced, and ordered him to convey the
intelligence to the prisoners. He further charged him with the duty of
shriving the victims, and preparing their souls for death. The bishop
fell on his knees, aghast at the terrible decree. He implored the
Governor-General to have mercy upon the two unfortunate nobles. If their
lives could not be spared, he prayed him at any rate to grant delay. With
tears and earnest supplications the prelate endeavored to avert or to
postpone the doom which had been pronounced. It was in vain. The
sentence, inflexible as destiny, had been long before ordained. Its
execution had been but hastened by the temporary triumph of rebellion in
Friesland. Alva told the Bishop roughly that he had not been summoned to
give advice. Delay or pardon was alike impossible. He was to act as
confessor to the criminals, not as councillor to the Viceroy. The Bishop,
thus rebuked, withdrew to accomplish his melancholy mission. Meanwhile,
on the same evening, the miserable Countess of Egmont had been appalled
by rumors, too vague for belief, too terrible to be slighted. She was in
the chamber of Countess Aremberg, with whom she had come to condole for
the death of the Count, when the order for the immediate execution of her
own husband was announced to her. She hastened to the presence of the
Governor-General. The Princess Palatine, whose ancestors had been
emperors, remembered only that she was a wife and a mother. She fell at
the feet of the man who controlled the fate of her husband, and implored
his mercy in humble and submissive terms. The Duke, with calm and almost
incredible irony, reassured the Countess by the information that, on the
morrow, her husband was certainly to be released. With this ambiguous
phrase, worthy the paltering oracles of antiquity, the wretched woman was
obliged to withdraw. Too soon afterward the horrible truth of the words
was revealed to her--words of doom, which she had mistaken for
consolation.

An hour before midnight the Bishop of Ypres reached Egmont's prison. The
Count was confined in a chamber on the second story of the Brood-huis,
the mansion of the crossbowmen's guild, in that corner of the building
which rests on a narrow street running back from the great square. He was
arou