One striking feature in the conduct of Edward the Second is the remarkable meekness and submission with which he bore his father's angry outbursts and severe punishments—often administered for mere youthful follies, such as most fathers would think amply punished by a strong lecture, and perhaps a few strokes of the cane. Edward the First seems to have been one of those men who entirely forget their own childhood, and are never able in after life to enter into the feelings of a child.

His Majesty, however, had other matters to attend to beside the provocation received from his heir; for in the month of September following (1299) he was married at Canterbury to the Princess Marguerite of France. It was a case approaching that of Rachel and Leah, for it was the beautiful Princess Blanche for whom the King had been in treaty, and Marguerite was foisted on him by a process of crafty diplomacy not far removed from treachery. However, since Marguerite, though not so fair as her sister, proved the better woman of the two, the King had no reason to be disappointed in the end.

The Council of Regency established in Scotland, discontented with Edward's arbitration, referred the question of their independence to the Pope, and that wily potentate settled the matter in his own interests, by declaring Scotland a fief of the Holy See. The King was still warring in that vicinity; the young Queen was left with her baby boy in Yorkshire to await his return.

It was a hot July day, and Vivian, who highly disapproved of the stagnation of Berkhamsted, declared his intention of going out to hunt. People hunted in all weathers and seasons in the Middle Ages. Ademar declined to accompany him, and he contented himself by taking two of the Earl's squires and a handful of archers as company. The Earl did not interfere with Vivian's proceedings. He was quite aware that the quiet which he loved was by no means to everybody's taste; and he left his retinue at liberty to amuse themselves as they pleased.

Vivian did not think it necessary to turn the key on Clarice; but he gave her a severe lecture on discreet behaviour which astonished her, since her conscience did not accuse her of any breach of that virtue, and she could not trace the course of her husband's thoughts. Clarice meekly promised to bear the recommendation in mind; and Vivian left her to her own devices.

The day dragged heavily. Mistress Underdone sat with Heliet and Clarice at work; but not much work was gone through, for in everybody's opinion it was too hot to do anything. The tower in which they were was at the back of the Castle, and looked upon the inner court. The Earl's apartments were in the next tower, and there, despite the heat, he was going over sundry grants and indentures with Father Bevis and his bailiff, always considering the comfort and advantage of his serfs and tenants. The sound of a horn outside warned the ladies that in all probability Vivian was returning home; and whether his temper were good, bad, or indifferent was likely to depend on the condition of his hunting-bags. Good, was almost too much to hope for. With a little smothered sigh Clarice ventured to hope that it might not be worse than indifferent. Her comfort for the next day or two would be much affected by it.

They looked out of the window, but all they saw was Ademar crossing the inner court with rapid steps, and disappearing within the Earl's tower. There was some noise in the outer court, but no discernible solution of it. The ladies went back to their work. Much to their surprise, ten minutes later, the Earl himself entered the chamber. It was not at all his wont to come there. When he had occasion to send orders to Clarice concerning his household arrangements, he either sent for her or conveyed them through Vivian. These were the Countess's rooms which they were now occupying, and the Earl had never crossed the threshold since she left the Castle.

They looked up, and saw in his face that he had news to tell them. And all at once Clarice rose and exclaimed—"Vivian!"

"Dame, I grieve to tell you that your knight has been somewhat hurt in his hunting."

Clarice was not conscious of any feeling but the necessity of knowing all. And that she had not yet been told all she felt certain.

"Much hurt?" she asked.

"I fear so," answered the Earl.

"My Lord, will you tell me all?"

The Earl took her hand and looked kindly at her. "Dame, he is dead."

Mistress Underdone raised her hands with an exclamation of shocked surprise, to which Heliet's look of horror formed a fitting corollary. Clarice was conscious only of a confused medley of feelings, from which none but a sense of amazement stood out in the foreground. Then the Earl quietly told her that, in leaping a wide ditch, Vivian had been thrown from his horse, and had never spoken more.

No one tried to comfort Clarice. Pitifully they all felt that comfort was not wanted now. The death of Rosie had been a crushing blow; but Vivian's, however sudden, could hardly be otherwise than a relief. The only compassion that any one could feel was for him, for whom there was—

"No reckoning made, but sent to his account With all his imperfections on his head."

The very fact that she could not regret him on her own account lay a weight on Clarice's conscience, though it was purely his own fault. Severely as she tried to judge herself, she could recall no instance in which, so far as such a thing can be said of any human sinner, she had not done her duty by that dead man. She had obeyed him in letter and spirit, however distasteful it had often been to herself; she had consulted his wishes before her own; she had even honestly tried to love him, and he had made it impossible. Now, she could not resist the overwhelming consciousness that his death was to her a release from her fetters—a coming out of prison. She was free from the perpetual drag of apprehension on the one hand, and of constantly endeavouring on the other to please a man who was determined not to be pleased. The spirit of the uncaged bird awoke within her—a sense of freedom, and light, and rest, such as she had not known for those eight weary years of her married slavery.

Yet the future was no path of roses to the eyes of Clarice. She was not free in the thirteenth century, in the sense in which she would have been free in the nineteenth, for she had no power to choose her own lot. All widows were wards of the Crown; and it was not at all usual for the Crown to concern its august self respecting their wishes, unless they bought leave to comply with them at a very costly price. By a singular perversion of justice, the tax upon a widow who purchased permission to remarry or not, at her pleasure, was far heavier than the fine exacted from a man who married a ward of the Crown without royal licence. The natural result of this arrangement was that the ladies who were either dowered widows or spinster heiresses very often contracted clandestine marriages, and their husbands quietly endured the subsequent fine and imprisonment, as unavoidable evils which were soon over, and well worth the advantage which they purchased.

It seemed, however, as if blessings, no less than misfortunes, were not to come single to Clarice Barkeworth. A few weeks after Vivian's death, the Earl silently put a parchment into her hand, which conveyed to her the information that King Edward had granted to his well-beloved cousin, Edmund, Earl of Cornwall, the marriage of Clarice, widow of Vivian Barkeworth, knight, with the usual proviso that she was not to marry one of the King's enemies. This was, indeed, something for which to be thankful. Clarice knew that her future was as safe in her master's hands as in her own.

"Ah!" said Heliet, when that remark was made to her, "if we could only have felt, dear heart, that it was as safe in the hands of his Master!"

"Was I very faithless, Heliet?" said Clarice, with tears in her eyes.

"Dear heart, no more than I was!" was Heliet's answer.

"But has it not occurred to thee, Heliet, now—why might I not have had Rosie?"

"I know not, dear Clarice, any more than Rosie knew, when she was a babe in thine arms, why thou gavest her bitter medicine. Oh, leave all that alone—our Master understands what He is doing."

It was the middle of September, and about two months after Vivian's death. Clarice sat sewing, robed in the white weeds of widowhood, in the room which she usually occupied in the Countess's tower. The garments worn by a widow were at this time extremely strict and very unbecoming, though the period during which they were worn was much less stringent than now. From one to six months was as long as many widows remained in that condition. Heliet had not been seen for an hour or more, and Mistress Underdone, with some barely intelligible remarks very disparaging to "that Nell," who stood, under her, at the head of the kitchen department, had disappeared to oversee the venison pasty. Clarice was doing something which she had not done for eight years, though hardly aware that she was doing it—humming a troubadour song. Getting past an awkward place in her work, words as well as music became audible—

"And though my lot were hard and bare, And though my hopes were few, Yet would I dare one vow to swear My heart should still be true."

"Wouldst thou, Clarice?" asked a voice behind her.

Clarice's delicate embroidery got the worst of it, for it dropped in a heap on the rushes, and nobody paid the slightest attention to it for a considerable time. Nor did any one come near the room until Heliet made her appearance, and she came so slowly, and heralded her approach by such emphatic raps of her crutches on the stone floor, that Clarice could scarcely avoid the conclusion that she was a conspirator in the plot. The head and front of it all, however, was manifestly Earl Edmund, who received Sir Piers with a smile and no other greeting—a distinct intimation that it was not the first time they had met that day.

The wedding—which nobody felt inclined to dispute—was fixed for the fifteenth of October. The Earl wished it to take place when he could be present and give away the bride, and he wanted first a fortnight's retreat at Ashridge, to which place he had arranged to go on the last day of September. Sir Piers stepped at once into his old position, but the Earl took Ademar with him to Ashridge. He gave the grant of Clarice's marriage to Piers himself, in the presence of the household, with the remark:—

"It will be better in your hands than mine; and there is no time like the present."

Into Clarice's hand her master put a shining pile of gold for the purchase of wedding garments and jewellery.

"I am glad," he said, "that your path through life is coming to the roses now. I would hope the thorns are over for you—at least for some time. There have been no roses for me; but I can rejoice, I hope, with those for whom they blossom."

And so he rode away from Berkhamsted, looking back to smile a farewell to Heliet and Clarice, as they stood watching him in the gateway. Long years afterwards they remembered that kind, almost affectionate, smile.

As the ladies turned into their own tower, and began to ascend the staircase—always a slow process with Heliet—Clarice said, "I cannot understand why our Lord the Earl has such a lonely and sorrowful lot."

"Thou wouldst like to understand everything, Clarice," returned Heliet, smiling.

"I would!" she answered. "I can understand my own troubles better, for I know how much there is in me that needs setting right; but he—why he is almost an angel already."

"Perhaps he would tell thee the same thing," said Heliet. "I am afraid, dear heart, if thou hadst the graving of our Lord's gems, thou wouldst stop the tool before the portrait was in sufficient relief."

"But when the portrait is in sufficient relief?" answered Clarice, earnestly.

"Ah, dear heart!" said Heliet, "neither thine eyes nor mine are fine enough to judge of that."

"It seems almost a shame to be happy when I know he is not," replied Clarice, the tears springing to her eyes; "our dear master, who has been to me as a very angel of God."

"Nay, dear, he would wish thee to be happy," gently remonstrated Heliet. "I believe both thou and I are to him as daughters, Clarice."

"I wish I could make him happy!" said Clarice, as they turned into her rooms.

"Ask God to do it," was Heliet's response.

They both asked Him that night. And He heard and answered them, but, as is often the case, not at all as they expected.



CHAPTER TWELVE.

IN THE CITY OF GOLD.

"I am not eager, strong, Nor bold—all that is past; I am ready not to do, At last—at last.

"My half-day's work is done, And this is all my part: I give a patient God My patient heart."

Vespers were over at Ashridge on the last day of September, the evening of the Earl's arrival. He sat in the guest-chamber, with the Prior and his Buckinghamshire bailiff, to whom he was issuing instructions with respect to some cottages to be built for the villeins on one of his estates. The Prior sat by in silence, while the Earl impressed on the mind of his agent that the cottages were to be made reasonably comfortable for the habitation of immortal souls and not improbably suffering bodies. When at last the bailiff had departed, the Prior turned to his patron with a smile. "I would all lay lords—and spiritual ones too—were as kindly thoughtful of their inferiors as your Lordship."

"Ah, how little one can do at the best!" said the Earl. "Life is full of miseries for these poor serfs; shall we, who would follow Christ's steps, not strive to lighten it?"

"It is very truth," said the Prior.

"Ay, and how short the boundary is!" pursued the Earl. "'Man is ignorant what was before him; and what shall be after him, who can tell him?' It may be, the next lord of these lands will be a hard man, who will oppress his serfs, or at any rate take no care for their comfort. Poor souls! let them be happy as long as they can."

"When I last saw your Lordship, you seemed to think that short boundary too long for your wishes."

"It is seven years since that," answered the Earl. "It hardly seems so far away now. And lately, Father—I scarcely can tell how—I have imagined that my life will not be long. It makes me the more anxious to do all I can ere 'the night cometh in which no man can work.'"

The Prior looked critically and anxiously at his patron. The seven years which he had passed in sorrowful loneliness had aged him more than seven years ought to have done. He was not fifty yet, but he was beginning to look like an old man. The burden and heat of the day were telling on him sadly.

"Right, my Lord," replied the Prior; "yet let me beg of your Lordship not to over-weary yourself. Your life is a precious thing to all dependent on you, and not less to us, your poor bedesmen here."

"Ah, Father! is my life precious to any one?" was the response, with a sad smile.

"Indeed it is," answered the Prior earnestly. "As your Lordship has just said, he who shall come after you may be harsh and unkind, and your poor serfs may sorely feel the change. No man has a right to throw away life, my Lord, and you have much left to live for."

Perhaps the Earl had grown a little morbid. Was it any wonder if he had? He shook his head.

"We have but one life," continued the Prior, "and it is our duty to make the best of it—that is, to do God's will with it. And when it is God's will to say unto us, 'Come up higher,' we may be sorry that we have served Him no better, but not, I think, that we have given no more time to our own ease, nor even to our own sorrows."

"And yet," said the Earl, resting his head upon one hand, "one gets very, very tired sometimes of living."

"Cannot we trust our Father to call us to rest when we really need it?" asked the Prior. "Nor is it well that in looking onward to the future glory we should miss the present rest to be had by coming to Him, and casting all our cares and burdens at His feet."

"Does He always take them?"

"Always—if we give them. But there is such a thing as asking Him to take them, and holding them out to Him, and yet keeping fast hold of the other end ourselves. He will hardly take what we do not give."

The Earl looked earnestly into his friend's eyes.

"Father, I will confess that these seven years—nay! what am I saying? these eight-and-twenty—I have not been willing that God should do His will. I wanted my will done. For five-and-forty years, ever since I could lisp the words, I have been saying to Him with my lips, Fiat voluntas tua. But only within the last few days have I really said to Him in my heart, Lord, have Thy way. It seemed to me—will you think it very dreadful if I confess it?—that I wanted but one thing, and that it was very hard of God not to let me have it. I did not say such a thing in words; I could talk fluently of being resigned to His will, but down at the core of my heart I was resigned to everything but one, and I was not resigned to that at all. And I think I only became resigned when I gave over trying and working at resignation, and sank down, like a tired child, at my Father's feet. But now I am very tired, and I would fain that my Father would take me up in His arms."

The Prior did not speak. He could not. He only looked very sorrowfully into the worn face of the heart-wearied man, with a conviction which he was unable to repress, that the time of the call to come up higher was not far away. He would have been thankful to disprove his conclusion, but to stifle it he dared not.

"I hope," said the Earl in the same low tone, "that there are quiet corners in Heaven where weary men and women may lie down and rest a while at our Lord's feet. I feel unfit to take a place all at once in the angelic choir. Not unready to praise—I mean not that—only too weary, just at first, to care for anything but rest."

There were tears burning under the Prior's eyelids; but he was silent still. That was not his idea of Heaven; but then he was less weary of earth. He felt almost vexed that the only passage of Scripture which would come to him was one utterly unsuited to the occasion—"They rest not day nor night." Usually fluent and fervent, he was tongue-tied just then.

"Did Christ our Lord need the rest of His three days and nights in the grave?" suggested the Earl, thoughtfully. "He must have been very weary after the agony of His cross. I think He must have been very tired of His life altogether. For was it not one passion from Bethlehem to Calvary? And He could hardly have been one of those strong men who never seem to feel tired. Twice we are told that He was weary—when He sat on the well, and when He slept in the boat. Father, I ought to ask your pardon for speaking when I should listen, and seeming to teach where I ought to be taught."

"Nay, my Lord, say not so, I pray you." The Prior found his voice at last. "I have learned to recognise my Master's voice, whether I hear it from the rostrum of the orator or from the lowly hovel of the serf. And it is not the first time that I have heard it in yours."

The Earl looked up with an expression of surprise, and then shook his head again with a smile.

"Nay, good Father, flatter me not so far."

He might have added more, but the sound of an iron bar beaten on a wooden board announced the hour of supper. The Earl conversed almost cheerfully with the Prior and his head officers during supper; and Ademar remarked to the Cellarer that he had not for a long while seen his master so like his old self.

The first of October rose clear and bright. At Berkhamsted, the ladies were spending the morning in examining the contents of a pedlar's well-stocked pack, and buying silk, lawn, furs, and trimmings for the wedding. At Ashridge, the Earl was walking up and down the Priory garden, looking over the dilapidations which time had wrought in his monastery, and noting on his tables sundry items in respect of which he meant to repair the ravages. At Romsey, Mother Margaret, in her black patched habit and up-turned sleeves, was washing out the convent refectory, and thereby, she fervently hoped, washing her sins out of existence—without a thought of the chivalrous love which would have set her high above all such menial labour, and would never have permitted even the winds of heaven to "visit her cheek too roughly." Did it never occur to her that she might have allowed the Redeemer of men to "make her salvation" for her, and yet have allowed herself to make her husband's life something better to him than a weary burden?

The day's work was over, and the recreation time had come. The Prior of Ashridge tapped at the door of the guest-chamber, and was desired to enter.

He found the Earl turning over the leaves of his Psalter.

"Look here, Father," said the latter, pointing out the fifteenth verse of the ninetieth Psalm.

"We are glad for the days wherein Thou didst humiliate us; the years wherein we have seen evil."

"What does that mean?" said the Earl. "Is it that we thank God for the afflictions He has given us? It surely does not mean—I hope not—that our comfort is to last just as long as our afflictions have lasted, and not a day longer."

"Ah, my Lord, God is no grudging giver," answered the Prior. "The verse before it, methinks, will reply to your Lordship—'we exult and are glad all our days.' All our earthly life have we been afflicted; all our heavenly one shall we be made glad."

"Glad! I hardly know what the word means," was the pathetic reply.

"You will know it then," said the Prior.

"You will—but shall I? I have been such an unprofitable servant!"

"Nay, good my Lord, but are you going to win Heaven by your own works?" eagerly demanded the Bonus Homo. "'Beginning in the spirit, are ye consummated in the flesh?' Surely you have not so learned Christ. Hath He not said, 'Life eternal give I to them; and they shall not perish for ever, and none shall snatch them out of My hand'?"

"True," said the Earl, bowing his head.

But this was Vaudois teaching. And though Earl Edmund, first of all men in England, had drunk in the Vaudois doctrines, yet even in him they had to struggle with a mass of previous teaching which required to be unlearned—with all that rubbish of man's invention which Rome has built up on the One Foundation. It was hard, at times, to keep the old ghosts from coming back, and troubling by their shadowy presence the soul whom Christ had brought into His light.

There was silence for a time. The Earl's head was bent forward upon his clasped hands on the table, and the Prior, who thought that he might be praying, forbore to disturb him. At length he said, "My Lord, the supper-hour is come."

The Earl gave no answer, and the Prior thought he had dropped asleep. He waited till the board was struck with the iron bar as the signal for supper. Then he rose and addressed the Earl again. The silence distressed him now. He laid his hand upon his patron's shoulder, but there was no response. Gently, with a sudden and terrible fear, he lifted the bowed head and looked into his face. And then he knew that the weary heart was glad at last—that life eternal in His beatific presence had God given to him. From far and near the physicians were summoned that night, but only to tell the Prior what he already knew. They stood round the bed on which the corpse had been reverently laid, and talked of his mysterious disease in hard words of sonorous Latin. It would have been better had they called it in simple English what it was—a broken heart. Why such a fate was allotted to one of the best of all our princes, He knows who came to bind up the broken-hearted, and who said by the lips of His prophet, "Reproach hath broken mine heart."

Ademar was sent back to Berkhamsted with the woeful news. There was bitter mourning there. It was not, perhaps, in many of the household, unmixed with selfish considerations, for to a large proportion of them the death of their master meant homelessness for the present, and to nearly all sad apprehensions for the future. Yet there was a great deal that was not selfish, for the gentle, loving, humane, self-abnegating spirit of the dead had made him very dear to all his dependants, and more hearts wept for him than he would ever have believed possible.

But there was one person in especial to whom it was felt the news ought to be sent. The Prior despatched no meaner member of the Order, but went himself to tell the dark tidings at Romsey.

He pleaded hard for a private interview with the Countess, but the reigning Abbess of Romsey was a great stickler for rule, and she decided that it was against precedent, and therefore propriety, that one of her nuns should be thus singled out from the rest. The announcement must be made in the usual way, to the whole convent, at vespers.

So, in the well-known tones of the Prior of Ashridge,—some time the Earl's confessor, and his frequent visitor,—with the customary request to pray for the repose of the dead, to the ears of Mother Margaret, as she knelt in her stall with the rest, came the sound of the familiar name of Edmund, Earl of Cornwall.

Very tender and pathetic was the tone in which the intimation was given. The heart of the Prior himself was so wrung that he could not imagine such a feeling as indifference in that of the woman who had been the dearest thing earth held for that dead man. But if he looked down the long row of black, silent figures for any sign or sound, he looked in vain. There was not even a trembling of Mother Margaret's black veil as her voice rose untroubled in the response with all the rest—

"O Jesu dulcis! O Jesu pie! O Jesu, Fili Maria! Dona eis requiem."

In the recreation-time which followed, the Prior sought out Mother Margaret. He found her without difficulty, seated on a form at the side of the room, talking to a sister nun, and he caught a few words of the conversation as he approached.

"I assure thee, Sister Regina, it is quite a mistake. Mother Wymarca told me distinctly that the holy Mother gave Sister Maud an unpatched habit, and it is all nonsense in her to say there was a patch on the elbow."

The Prior bit his lips, but he restrained himself, and sat down, reverently saluted by both nuns as he did so. Was she trying to hide her feelings? thought he.

"Sister Margaret, I brought you tidings," he said, as calmly as was in him.

The nun turned upon him a pair of cold, steel-blue eyes, as calm and irresponsive as if he had brought her no tidings whatever.

"I heard them, Father, if it please you. Has he left any will?"

The priest-nature in the Prior compelled him officially to avoid any reprehension of this perfect monastic calm; but the human nature, which in his case lay beneath it, was surprised and repelled.

"He has left a will, wherein you are fully provided for."

"Oh, that is nice!" said Mother Margaret, in tones of unquestionable gratulation. "And how much am I to have? Of course I care about it only for the sake of the Abbey."

The Prior had his private ideas on that point; for, as he well knew, the vow of poverty was somewhat of a formality in the Middle Ages, since the nun who brought to her convent a title and a fortune was usually not treated in the same manner as a penniless commoner.

"The customary dower to a widow, Sister."

"Do you mean to say I am only to have my third? Well, I call that shameful! And so fond of me as he always professed to be! I thought he would have left me everything."

The Prior experienced a curious sensation in his right arm, which, had Mother Margaret not been a woman, or had he been less of a Christian and a Church dignitary, might have resulted in the measuring of her length on the floor of the recreation-room. But she was totally unconscious of any such feeling on his part. Her heart—or that within her which did duty for one—had been touched at last.

"Well, I do call it disgraceful!" she repeated.

"And is that all?" asked the Prior involuntarily, and not by any means in consonance with his duty as a holy priest addressing a veiled nun. But priests and nuns have no business with hearts of any sort, and he ought to have known this as well as she did.

"All?" she said, with a rather puzzled look in the frosty blue eyes. "I would it had been a larger sum, Father; for the convent's sake, of course."

"And am I to hear no word of regret, Sister, for the man to whom you were all the world?"

This was, of course, a most shocking speech, considering the speaker and the person whom he addressed; but it came warm from that inconvenient heart which had no business to be beneath the Prior's cassock. Mother Margaret was scandalised, and she showed it in her face, which awoke her companion to the fact that he was not speaking in character. That a professed nun should be expected to feel personal and unspiritual interest in an extern! and, as if that were not enough, in a man! Mother Margaret's sense of decorum was quite outraged.

"How could such thoughts trouble the blessed peace of a holy sister?" she wished to know. "Pardon me, Father; I shall pray for his soul, of course. What could I do more?"

And the Prior recognised at last that to the one treasure of that dead man's heart, the news he brought was less than it had been to him.

He bit his lips severely. It was all he could do to keep from telling her that the pure, meek, self-abnegating soul which had passed from earth demanded far fewer prayers than the cold, hard, selfish spirit which dwelt within her own black habit.

"It is I who require pardon, Sister," he said, in a constrained voice. "May our Lord in His mercy forgive us all!"

He made no further attempt to converse with Mother Margaret. But, as he passed her a few minutes later, he heard that she and Sister Regina had gone back to the previous subject, which they were discussing with some interest in their tones.

"O woman, woman!" groaned the Prior, in his heart; "the patch on Sister Maud's elbow is more to thee than all the love thou hast lost. Ah, my dear Lord! it is not you that I mourn. You are far better hence."

From which speech it will be seen that the Bonus Homo was very far from being a perfect monk.

The actions of Mother Margaret admirably matched her words. She gave herself heart and soul to the important business of securing her miserable third of her dead lord's lands and goods. Not till they were safe in her possession did she allow herself any rest.

Did the day ever come when her feelings changed? During the ten years which she outlived the man who had loved her with every fibre of his warm, great heart, did her heart ever turn regretfully, when Abbesses were harsh or life was miserable, to the thought of that tender, faithful love which, so far as in it lay, would have sheltered her life from every breath of discomfort? Did she ever in all those ten years whisper to herself—

"Oh, if he would but come again, I think I'd vex him so no more!"

Did she ever murmur such words as—

"I was not worthy of you, Douglas, Not half worthy the like of you!"

...words which, honestly sobbed forth in very truth, would have been far nearer real penitence than all the "acts of contrition" which passed her lips day by day.

God knoweth. Men will never know. But all history and experience tend to assure us that women such as Margaret de Clare usually die as they have lived, and that of all barriers to penitence and conversion there is none so hard to overthrow as indulged malice and deliberate hardening of the heart against the love of God and man.

————————————————————————————————————

There was not, as Piers and Clarice had feared there might have been, any misfortune to them in the way of preventing their marriage. King Edward had great respect for justice and honour, and finding that his cousin had, though without legal formalities, granted Clarice's marriage to Piers, he confirmed the grant, and Father Bevis married them quietly in the chapel of Berkhamsted Castle, without any festivity or rejoicings, for the embalmed body of the master to whom they owed so much lay in state in the banquet-hall. It was a mournful ceremony, where—

"The cheers that had erst made the welkin ring Were drowned in the tears that were shed for the King."

Clarice and Piers made no attempt to obtain any further promotion. They retired to a little estate in Derbyshire, which shortly afterwards fell to Piers, and there they spent their lives, in serving their generation according to the will of God, often brightened by visits from Ademar and Heliet, who had taken up their abode not far from them in the neighbouring county of Rutland. And as time went on, around Clarice grew up brave sons and fair daughters, to all of whom she made a very loving mother; but, perhaps, no one was ever quite so dear to her heart as the star which had gleamed on her life the brighter for the surrounding darkness, the little white rosebud which had been gathered for the garden of God.

"In other springs her life might be In bannered bloom unfurled; But never, never match her wee White Rose of all the world."

It was not until the spring which followed his death was blooming into green leaves and early flowers that the coffin of Edmund, Earl of Cornwall, was borne to the magnificent Abbey of Hales in Gloucestershire, founded by his father. There they laid him down by father and mother—the grand, generous, spendthrift Prince who had so nearly borne the proud title of Caesar Augustus, and the fair, soft, characterless Princess who had been crowned with him as Queen of the Romans. For the Prince who was laid beside them that Easter afternoon, the world had prepared what it considers a splendid destiny. Throne and diadem, glory and wealth, love and happiness, were to have been his, so far as it lay in the world's power to give them; but on most of all these God had laid His hand, and forbidden them to come near the soul which He had marked for His own. For him there was to be an incorruptible crown, but no corruptible; the love of the Lord that bought him, but not the love of the woman on whom he set his heart. Now—whatever he may have thought on earth—now, standing on the sea of glass, and having the harp of God, he knows which was the better portion.

He wore no crown; he founded no dynasty; he passed away, like a name written in water, followed only by the personal love of a few hearts which were soon dust like him, and by the undying curses and calumnies of the Church which he had done his best to purify against her will. But shall we, looking back across the six centuries which lie between us and him who brought Protestantism into England—shall we write on his gravestone in the ruined Abbey of Hales, "This man lived in vain?"

THE END.