l choir, speaking
of eternal peace, Eleanor bowed her head under her veil, as her bosom
swelled with a strange yearning longing, not exactly grief, and large
tears dropped from her eyes as she thought less of her mother than of
her noble-hearted father; and the words came back to her in which Father
Malcolm Stewart, in his own bitter grief, had told the desolate children
to remember that their father was waiting for them in Paradise. Even
Jean was so touched by the music and carried out of herself that she
forgot the spectators, forgot the effect she was to produce, forgot her
struggle with her uncle, and sobbed and wept with all her heart, perhaps
with the more abandon because she, like all the rest, was fasting.

With much reverence for her emotion, the King, when the service was
over, led her out of the church to the adjoining palace, where the Queen
of Wight and the Countess of Suffolk, a kinswoman through the mother
of the Beauforts, conducted the ladies to unveil themselves before they
were to join the noontide refection with the King.

There was no great state about it, spread, as it was, not in the great
hall, but in the richly-tapestried room called Paradise. The King's
manner was most gently and sweetly courteous to both sisters. His three
little orphan half-brothers, the Tudors, were at table; and his kind
care to send them dainties, and the look with which he repressed an
unseasonable attempt of Jasper's to play with the dogs, and Edmund's
roughness with little Owen, reminded the sisters of Mary with 'her
weans,' and they began to speak of them when the meal was over, while
he showed them his chief treasures, his books. There was St. Augustine's
City of God, exquisitely copied; there was the History of St. Louis, by
the bon Sire de Joinville; there were Sir John Froissart's Chronicles,
the same that the good Canon had presented to King Richard of Bordeaux.

Jean cast a careless glance at the illuminations, and exclaimed at Queen
Isabel's high headgear and her becloaked greyhound. Eleanor looked and
longed, and sighed that she could not read the French, and only a very
little of the Latin.

'This you can read,' said Henry, producing the Canterbury Tales; 'the
fair minstrelsy of my Lady of Suffolk's grandsire.'

Eleanor was enchanted. Here were the lines the King of Wight had
repeated to her, and she was soon eagerly listening as Henry read to her
the story of 'Patient Grisell.'

'Ah! but is it well thus