It proved the easiest thing in the world to convince King Henry that he
had not intended Richard to marry Margaret. Had his dearly-beloved
uncle, the Bishop of Valentia, held up before him a black cloth, and
said, "This is white," His Majesty would merely have wondered what could
be the matter with his eyes.

The next point was to persuade that royal and most deceivable individual
that he had entertained an earnest desire to see Richard married to a
Princess of Savoy, a cousin of the Queen. This, also, was not
difficult. The third lesson instilled into him was that, Richard having
thought proper to render this impossible by choosing for himself, he,
King Henry, was a cruelly-injured and unpardonably insulted man. His
Majesty swallowed them all as glibly as possible. The metal being thus
fused to the proper state, the prisoners were brought before their
affronted Sovereign in person.

They were tried in inverse order, according to importance. Father Bruno
could prove, without much difficulty, that the obnoxious marriage had
taken place, on the showing of the prosecution itself, before he had
entered the household. His penalty was the light one of discharge from
the Countess's service. That he deserved no penalty at all was not
taken into consideration. The Crown could not so far err as to bring a
charge against an entirely innocent man. The verdict, therefore, in
Father Bruno's case resembled that of the famous jury who returned as
theirs, "Not Guilty, but we hope he won't do it again."

Master Aristoteles was next placed in the dock, and had the honour of
amusing the Court. His asseverations of innocent ignorance were so
mixed up with dissertations on the virtues of savin and betony, and
lamenting references to the last eclipse which might have warned him of
what was coming on him, that the Court condescended to relax into a
smile, and let the simple man go with the light sentence of six months'
imprisonment. At a subsequent period in his life, Master Aristoteles
was wont to say that this sentence was the best thing that ever happened
to him, since the enforced meditation and idleness had enabled him to
think out his grand discovery that the dust which gathered on beams of
chestnut wood was an infallible specific for fever. He had since
treated three fever patients in this manner, and not one of them had
died. Whether the patients would have recovered without the dust, and
with being so much let alone, M