When
Lancelot looked upon her dead face he wept not greatly, but sighed. And
he said all the service for the dead himself, and in the morning he sang
mass.

Then was the corpse placed in a horse-bier, and so taken to Glastonbury
with a hundred torches ever burning about it, and Lancelot and his
fellows on foot beside it, singing and reading many a holy orison, and
burning frankincense about the corpse.

When the chapel had been reached, and services said by the hermit
archbishop, the queen's corpse was wrapped in cered cloth of Raines,
thirty-fold, and afterwards was put in a web of lead, and then in a
coffin of marble.

But when the corpse of her whom he had so long loved was put in the
earth, Lancelot swooned with grief, and lay long like one dead, till the
hermit came and aroused him, and said,--

"You are to blame for such unmeasured grief. You displease God thereby."

[Illustration: Copyright by F. Frith and Co. Ltd., London, England.

THE OLD KITCHEN OF GLASTONBURY ABBEY.]

"I trust not," Lancelot replied, "for my sorrow is too deep ever to
cease. When I remember how greatly I am to blame for the death of this
noble King Arthur and Queen Guenever, my heart sinks within me, and I
feel that I shall never know a moment's joy again."

Thereafter he sickened and pined away, for the bishop nor any of his
fellows could make him eat nor drink but very little, but day and night
he prayed, and wasted away, and ever lay grovelling on the tomb of the
queen.

So, within six weeks afterwards, Lancelot fell sick and lay in his bed.
Then he sent for the bishop and all his fellows, and said with sad
voice: "Sir Bishop, I pray you give me all the rites that belong to a
Christian man, for my end is at hand."

"This is but heaviness of your blood," replied the bishop. "You shall be
well amended, I hope, through God's grace, by to-morrow morning."

"In heaven, mayhap, but not on earth," said Lancelot. "So give me the
rites of the church, and after my death, I beg you to take my body to
Joyous Gard, for there I have vowed that I would be buried."

When they had heard this, and saw that he was indeed near his end, there
was such weeping and wringing of hands among his fellows that they could
hardly help the bishop in the holy offices of the church. But that
night, after the midnight hour, as the bishop lay asleep, he fell into
such a hearty laugh of joy that they all came to him in haste, and asked
him what ailed him.