Christabel--no more comforting visits from Roger.
Instead of them, one awful hour of scarcely imaginable anguish, and
then, from His seat on the right hand of God, Christ would rise to
receive His faithful witness--the Tree of Life would shade her, and the
Water of Life would refresh her, and no more would the sun light upon
her, nor any heat: she should be comforted for evermore. The better
hope was to be made way for by the extinction of the lower. She lifted
up her heart unto the Lord, and said silently within herself the ancient
Christian formula of the early Church--

"Amen, Lord Christ!--so let it be."

In a chair, for she was too crippled to walk, Alice was carried by two
of the gaoler's men outside the Cathedral precincts. She had not been
in the open air for a month. They carried her out eastwards, across
Burgate Street (which dates from the days of King Ethelred), down by the
city wall, past Saint George's Gate and the Grey Friars, up Sheepshank's
Lane, and so to the old Norman Castle, the keep of which is the third
largest of Norman keeps in England, and is now, to the glory of all the
Huns and Vandals, converted into a gasometer! In the barbican sat
several prisoners in chains, begging their bread. But Alice was borne
past this, and up the north-east staircase, from the walls of which
looked out at her verses of the Psalms in Hebrew--silent, yet eloquent
witnesses of the dispersion and suffering of Judah--and into a small
chamber, where she was laid down on a rude bed, merely a frame with
sacking and a couple of blankets upon it.

"Nights be cold yet," said the more humane of her two bearers. "The
poor soul 'll suffer here, I'm feared."

"She'll be warm enough anon," said the other and more brutal of the
pair. "I reckon the faggots be chopped by now that shall warm her."

Alice knew what he meant. He passed out of the door without another
word, but the first man lingered to say in a friendly tone--"Good even
to you, Mistress!" It was his little cup of cold water to Christ's
servant.

"Good even, friend," replied Alice; "and may our Saviour Christ one day
say to thee, `Inasmuch'!"

Yes, she would be warm enough by-and-by. There should be no more pain
nor toil, no more tears nor terrors, whither she was going. The King's
"Well done, good and faithful servant!" would mark the entrance on a new
life from which the former things had passed away.

She lay there alone till the evening, when the