e Queen's train,
eclipsing all in splendor, and all but her royal mistress in beauty. He
subjoined to these complaints of the unsatisfactoriness of a life of
pleasure, lamentable statements of the misrule of the King, and the
oppression of his government, the arbitrary punishments of the
Star-chamber, the illegal fines, loans and projects, by which the royal
coffers were filled, and concluded with affirming, that they only were
safe and happy, whose contracted wants, and mortified desires, asked but
the primeval simplicity of nature. All this time, though the honours of
the house of Neville lay in abeyance, the rents were received by De
Vallance, and Isabel wondered that so mortified a spirit should encumber
itself with the dross which it affected to despise.

Meantime Evellin, partially blinded by a fatal security, and in part
deprived of the use of his judgement by his acute feelings, at one time
scorned to impute treachery to the friend of his youth; at another fear
to trust even himself. One master stroke of policy still remained.
Walter wrote to him in great alarm; their correspondence was discovered
to the King, and reported to be of a factious tendency. He was in the
most imminent danger of being sacrificed to their mutual enemies. He
conjured Evellin to fly to some more remote retreat instantly, but first
to give up to the confidential agent, whom he named, all their
correspondence, that he might instantly destroy it, lest it should fall
into the hands of those who would construe it into a disclosure of the
King's counsels. The credulous Evellin fell into the snare. He returned
all Walter's letters, and retired with his family to a freehold of
Isabel's, situated among the mountainous parts of Lancashire, and in his
anxiety for Walter's safety, forgot for a time his own troubles. But
though their correspondence ceased, the voice of fame was not silent,
and its echoes reached even to the Fourness Fells, telling that Walter
De Vallance was created Earl of Bellingham, and that all the possessions
of the ancient house of Neville were bestowed on Lady Eleanor.

The ocean beats at the bottom of a cliff for ages, and imperceptibly
wears its rugged projections to smoothness; but an earthquake overthrows
it in an instant. The mind of Evellin, which for a period of seven years
had contended with hope and fear, sometimes almost suspecting, and at
other times rejecting distrust, was by this proof of his friend's
treachery,