lovely face and the sweet, soft voice
covered a soul white as the saints in Heaven! And men are easier
deluded by such dreams than women--or at least I think it. My poor
father! If only he had never seen her that haled him to his undoing! he
might, perchance, have been a better man. Any way, he paid the bill in
his heart's blood. So here I leave him. God forgive us all!

And now to my story. While I was but a little child, we saw little of
our mother: little more, indeed, than we did of our father. I think, of
the two, we oftener saw our grandmother. And little children, as God
hath wisely ordered it, live in the present moment, and take no note of
things around them which men and women see with half an eye. Now,
looking back, I can recall events which then passed by me as of no
import. It was so, and there was an end of it. But I can see now why
it was so: and I know enough to guess the often sorrowful nature of that
wherefore.

So it was nothing to us children, unless it were a relief, that after I
was about four years old, we missed our father almost entirely. We
never knew why he tarried away for months at a time. We had not a
notion that he was first in the prison of the Tower, and afterwards a
refugee over seas. And we saw without seeing that our mother grew thin
and white, and her sweet eyes were heavy with tears which we never saw
her shed. All we perceived was that she came oftener to the nursery,
and stayed longer with us, and petted the babies more than had been her
wont. And that such matters had a meaning,--a deep, sad, terrible
meaning--never entered our heads. Later on we knew that during those
lonely years her heart was being crucified, and crucifixion is a dying
that lasts long. But she never let us know it. I think she would not
damp our fresh childish glee by even the spray of that roaring cataract
wherein her life was overwhelmed. Mothers--such mothers as she--are
like a reflection of God.

I remember well, though I was but just seven years old, the night when
news came to Ludlow Castle that my father had escaped from the Tower.
It was a very hot night in August--too hot to sleep--and I lay awake,
chattering to Kate and Isabel, who were my bedfellows, about some grand
play we meant to have the next afternoon, in the great gallery--when all
at once we heard a horse come dashing up to the portcullis, past our
chamber wall, and a horn crying out into the night.

Isabel sat up i