midnight
She heard them in silence , and trembled to communicate to them the thoughts that had been passing through her mind as to the sanity and safety of their father . In a little , the restless prisoners began to fall over into their troubled sleep , and the moon , newly risen , sent in through the small windows a bright beam , that lay on the face of the corpse . She had wrought up her mind almost to a conviction that her husband had , in a fit of madness , thrown himself into the Borthwick , or otherwise committed suicide , and figured to her diseased fancy his body placed alongside of her son 's , and with that same pale beam resting on it , and exhibiting to her the features which she had so long looked on with delight , made rigid by the grasp of death . Every sound was now hushed , with the exception of the occasional broken mutterings of her sons , and the notes of the winged inhabitants of the upper parts of the tower , who cawed their hoarse omens to the midnight wanderer in the forest . Every thought that rose in her mind was charged with a double portion of awe ; and cold shivers , in opposition to her efforts to be firm , ran over her from head to heel , and precipitated her farther and farther into the depths of her fancied evils . Superstition might have borrowed a thousand aids from the circumstances in which she was placed ; but , though she was beyond the influence of the direct operation of that power , the thoughts of evil which she had some reason for indulging , borrowed a part of their dark hue from the clouds in which the mystic goddess is generally enshrined : the individual would indeed have been more than woman who could have sat in the situation in which she was placed , and measured her evils with the gauge of calm reason . While sunk in these gloomy reflections , a shrill blast of a horn reverberated among the hills .