fresh news:
and it was after Christmas before we knew the rest. Then, one winter
morrow, came a warrant of the Chancery, granting to my Lady all the
lands of her own inheritance, by reason of the execution of her husband.
And then she knew that all had come that would come.

We children, Meg except, had not yet been allowed to see our mother, who
had never stirred from her bedchamber. One evening, early in January,
we were sitting in her closet, clad in our new doole raiment (how I
hated it!), talking to one another in low voices, for I think we all had
a sort of instinct that things were going wrong somehow, even the babies
who understood least about it: when all at once, for none of us saw her
enter, a lady stood before us. A lady whom we did not know, clad in
white widow-doole, tall and stately, with a white, white face, so that
her weeds were scarcely whiter, and a kind of fixed, unalterable
expression of intense pain, yet unchangeable peace. It seemed to me
such a strange look. Whether the pain or the peace were the greater I
knew not, nor could I tell which was the newer. We girls sat and looked
at her with puzzled faces. Then a faint smile broke through the pain,
on the white face, like the sun breaking through clouds, and a voice we
knew, asked of us--

"Don't you know me, my children?"

And that was how our mother came back to us.

She did not leave us again. Ever since he died, she has lived for us.
That white face, full of peace and yet of pain, abides with her; her
colour has never returned. But I think the pain grows less with years,
and the peace grows more. She smiles freely, but it is faintly, as if
smiles hardly belonged to her, and were only a borrowed thing that might
not be kept; and her eyes never light up as of old--only that once, when
some months after our father's end, Nym and Geoff came back to us.
Then, just for one moment, her old face came again. For I think she had
given them up,--not to King Edward, but to Christ our Lord, who is her
King.

Ay, I never knew woman like her in that. There are many that will say
prayers, and there are some that will pray, which is another thing from
saying prayers: but never saw I one like her, that seemed to do all her
work and to live all her living in the very light of the Throne of God.
Just as an impassioned musician turns every thing into music, and a true
painter longs to paint every lovely thing he sees, so with her all
things turn