poor boy, still little more than a
stripling, and with that weight of disaster on his head--and he answered
to her faltering inquiry at first that all was well. Margaret adjured
him by the holy cross in her arms to tell her the truth: then when she
heard of the double blow, burst out in an impassioned cry. "I thank
Thee, Lord," she said, "that givest me this agony to bear in my death
hour." Her life had been much blessed; she had known few sorrows; it was
as a crown to that pure and lovelit existence that she had this moment
of bitterest anguish before God gave to His beloved sleep.

While this sad scene was enacting within, the country was full of tumult
and conspiracy without. Donald Bane, the brother of Malcolm, had no
doubt chafed at the Saxon regime under which the King had fallen, for
years, and struggled against the influences brought in from abroad in
the retinue of the foreigner, as has been done in every commonwealth in
history at one time or another. He represented the old world, the Celtic
rule, the traditions of the past. Some of the chroniclers indeed assert
that Malcolm was illegitimate and Donald Bane the rightful heir to the
crown. He was, at all events, a pretender kept in subjection while
Malcolm's strong hand held the sceptre, but ready to seize the first
opportunity of revolution. No doubt the news of the King's death, and of
that of his heir, would run like wildfire through the country; but it
would seem that the attempt of Donald must have been already organised,
since his siege of Edinburgh, where most of his brother's children were
with their mother, placed there for safety in the King's absence, had
already begun. Upon the death of the Queen, Donald was not likely to
have treated the royal children who stood in his way with much mercy;
and the state of affairs was desperate when young Ethelred, the third of
her sons, not yet arrived at man's estate, closed his mother's eyes, and
found himself at the head of the weeping family shut up within the
castle, surrounded by precipices on every side except that upon which
his angry uncle lay with all the forces of the discontented in Scotland
at his back, all the lovers of the old regime and enemies of the
stranger, and with a fierce contingent from Norway to support his Celtic
horde. In the simplicity of the narrative we hear not a word of the
troubled councils which must have been held while the boy prince in his
sorrow and the sudden dreadful respons