ng in the spirit, are ye
consummated in the flesh?' Surely you have not so learned Christ. Hath
He not said, `Life eternal give I to them; and they shall not perish for
ever, and none shall snatch them out of My hand'?"

"True," said the Earl, bowing his head.

But this was Vaudois teaching. And though Earl Edmund, first of all men
in England, had drunk in the Vaudois doctrines, yet even in him they had
to struggle with a mass of previous teaching which required to be
unlearned--with all that rubbish of man's invention which Rome has built
up on the One Foundation. It was hard, at times, to keep the old ghosts
from coming back, and troubling by their shadowy presence the soul whom
Christ had brought into His light.

There was silence for a time. The Earl's head was bent forward upon his
clasped hands on the table, and the Prior, who thought that he might be
praying, forbore to disturb him. At length he said, "My Lord, the
supper-hour is come."

The Earl gave no answer, and the Prior thought he had dropped asleep.
He waited till the board was struck with the iron bar as the signal for
supper. Then he rose and addressed the Earl again. The silence
distressed him now. He laid his hand upon his patron's shoulder, but
there was no response. Gently, with a sudden and terrible fear, he
lifted the bowed head and looked into his face. And then he knew that
the weary heart was glad at last--that life eternal in His beatific
presence had God given to him. From far and near the physicians were
summoned that night, but only to tell the Prior what he already knew.
They stood round the bed on which the corpse had been reverently laid,
and talked of his mysterious disease in hard words of sonorous Latin.
It would have been better had they called it in simple English what it
was--a broken heart. Why such a fate was allotted to one of the best of
all our princes, He knows who came to bind up the broken-hearted, and
who said by the lips of His prophet, "Reproach hath broken mine heart."

Ademar was sent back to Berkhamsted with the woeful news. There was
bitter mourning there. It was not, perhaps, in many of the household,
unmixed with selfish considerations, for to a large proportion of them
the death of their master meant homelessness for the present, and to
nearly all sad apprehensions for the future. Yet there was a great deal
that was not selfish, for the gentle, loving, humane, self-abnegating
spirit of the dead