see my new bower? [Boudoir]. O Aunt Marjory, I am so glad!"

The new bower was a very pretty room--for the thirteenth century--but
its girl-owner was the prettiest thing in it. Her age was thirteen that
day, but she was so tall that she might easily have been supposed two or
three years older. She had a very fair complexion, violet-blue eyes,
and hair exactly the colour of a cedar pencil. If physiognomy may be
trusted, the face indicated a loving and amiable disposition.

The two ladies who had just entered from the ante-room--the mother and
aunt of Margaret were both tall, finely-developed women, with shining
fair hair. They spoke French, evidently as the mother-tongue: but in
1234 that was the custom of all English nobles. These ladies had been
brought up in England from early maidenhood, but they were Scottish
Princesses--the eldest and youngest daughters of King William the Lion,
by his Norman Queen, Ermengarde de Beaumont. Both sisters were very
handsome, but the younger bore the palm of beauty in the artist's sense,
though she was not endowed with the singular charm of manner which
characterised her sister. Chroniclers tell us that the younger
Princess, Marjory, was a woman of marvellous beauty. Yet something more
attractive than mere beauty must have distinguished the Princess
Margaret, for two men of the most opposite dispositions to have borne
her image on their hearts till death, and for her husband--a man capable
of abject superstition, and with his hot-headed youth far behind him--to
have braved all the thunders of Rome, rather than put her away.

These royal sisters had a singular history. Their father, King William,
had put them for education into the hands of King John of England and
his Queen, Isabelle of Angouleme, when they were little more than
infants, in other words, he had committed his tender doves to the charge
of almost the worst man and woman whom he could have selected. There
were just two vices of which His English Majesty was not guilty, and
those were cowardice and hypocrisy. He was a plain, unvarnished
villain, and he never hesitated for a moment to let people see it.
Queen Isabelle had been termed "the Helen of the Middle Ages," alike
from her great beauty, and from the fact that her husband abducted her
when betrothed elsewhere. She can hardly be blamed for this, since she
was a mere child at the time: but as she grew up, she developed a
character quite worthy of the scou