to Jesu Christ. I should think she will be canonised some
day. I am sure she deserves it better than many an one whom I have
heard man name as meriting to be a saint. Perhaps it is possible to be
a saint and not be canonised. Must man not have been a saint before he
can be declared one? I know the Lady Julian would chide me for saying
that, and bid me remember that the Church only can declare man to be
saint. But I wonder myself if the Lord never makes saints, without
waiting for the Church to do it for Him. The Church may never call my
Lady "Saint Joan," but that will she be whether she be so-called or no.
And at times I think, too, that they who shall be privileged to dwell in
Heaven will find there a great company of saints of whom they never
heard, and perchance some of them that sit highest there will not be
those most accounted of in the Calendar and on festival days. But I do
not suppose--as an ancestress of my mother did, in a chronicle she wrote
which I once read; it is in the possession of her French relatives, and
was written by the Lady Elaine de Lusignan, daughter of Geoffroy Count
de la Marche, who was a son of that House [Note 5]--I do not suppose
that the saints who were nobles in this world will sit nearest the
Throne, and those who were peasants furthest off. Nay, I think it will
be another order of nobility that will obtain there. Those who have
served our Lord the best, and done the most for their fellow-men, these
I think will be the nobles of that world. For does not our Lord say
Himself that the first shall be last there, and the last first? And I
can guess that Joan de Mortimer, my Lady and mother, will not stand low
on that list. It is true, she was a Countess in this life; but it was
little to her comfort; and she was beside that early orphaned, and a
cruelly ill-used wife and a bereaved mother. Life brought her little
good: Heaven will bring her more.

But I wonder where one Agnes de Hastings will stand in that company.
Nay, rather, will she be there at all?

It would be well that I should think about it.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Note 1. A word which then included uniform and all lands of official
garb.

Note 2. On August 3rd she left Skipton, arriving at Pomfret on the 5th.

Note 3. I find no indication of the date: only that she was at Ludlow
on October 26, 1330.

Note 4. The precise date and place are not recorded, b