or
his sin, and let this one good deed, that I have preferred death rather
than break Thy law, rise before Thee as the incense with the evening
sacrifice!"

Yes, it was utter error. Yet the Christians of his day, one here and
there excepted, could have taught him no better. And what had they
offered him instead? Idol-worship, woman-worship, offerings for the
dead,--every thing which the law of God had forbidden. In the day when
the blood of the martyrs is demanded at the hand of Babylon, will there
be no reckoning for the souls of those thousand sons of Israel, whom she
has persistently thrust away from Christ, by erecting a rood-screen of
idols between Him and them?

When day dawned on the Monday, they pulled out of the cess-pool the body
of a dead man.

One month later, in the chapter-house at Canterbury, King Henry the
Third stood, an humble and helpless suppliant, before his assembled
Barons. There he was forced, utterly against his will and wish, to sign
an additional charter granting liberties to England, and binding his own
hands. It was Simon de Montfort who had brought matters to this pass.
But Simon de Montfort was not the tall, fair, stately man who forced the
pen into the unwilling fingers of the cowering King, and who held out
the Evangelisterium for the swearing of his hated oath. King Henry
looked up into the cold steel-like glitter of those stern blue eyes, and
the firm set expression of the compressed lips, and realised in an
instant that in this man he would find neither misgiving nor mercy. It
was a great perplexity to him that the man on whom he had showered such
favours should thus take part against him. He had forgotten all about
that April morning, twenty-three years before; and had no conception
that between himself and the eyes of Richard de Clare, floated

"A shadow like an angel's, with bright hair,"

nor that when that scene in the chapter-house was over, and Richard
returned his good Damascus blade to its scabbard, he murmured within his
heart to ears that heard not--

"I have avenged thee at last!"

But Richard never knew that his heaviest vengeance had been exacted one
month sooner, when, with that bitter mirth which Anselm had misnamed, he
left an unknown Jew to perish in misery.

The sun was setting that evening over Lincoln. Just on the rise of
Steephill stood a handsome Norman house, with a garden stretching
behind. In the garden, on a stone settle, sat an old pr