should
have admitted him to an audience by night, in the very tent of our royal
consort!--and dare to offer this as an excuse for his disobedience and
desertion! By my father's soul, Edith, thou shalt rue this thy life long
in a monastery!"

"My liege," said Edith, "your greatness licenses tyranny. My honour,
Lord King, is as little touched as yours, and my Lady the Queen can
prove it if she think fit. But I have already said I am not here to
excuse myself or inculpate others. I ask you but to extend to one, whose
fault was committed under strong temptation, that mercy, which even you
yourself, Lord King, must one day supplicate at a higher tribunal, and
for faults, perhaps, less venial."

"Can this be Edith Plantagenet?" said the King bitterly--"Edith
Plantagenet, the wise and the noble? Or is it some lovesick woman who
cares not for her own fame in comparison of the life of her paramour?
Now, by King Henry's soul! little hinders but I order thy minion's skull
to be brought from the gibbet, and fixed as a perpetual ornament by the
crucifix in thy cell!"

"And if thou dost send it from the gibbet to be placed for ever in my
sight," said Edith, "I will say it is a relic of a good knight, cruelly
and unworthily done to death by" (she checked herself)--"by one of whom
I shall only say, he should have known better how to reward chivalry.
Minion callest thou him?" she continued, with increasing vehemence. "He
was indeed my lover, and a most true one; but never sought he grace from
me by look or word--contented with such humble observance as men pay to
the saints. And the good--the valiant--the faithful must die for this!"

"Oh, peace, peace, for pity's sake," whispered the Queen, "you do but
offend him more!"

"I care not," said Edith; "the spotless virgin fears not the raging
lion. Let him work his will on this worthy knight. Edith, for whom he
dies, will know how to weep his memory. To me no one shall speak more of
politic alliances to be sanctioned with this poor hand. I could not--I
would not--have been his bride living--our degrees were too distant. But
death unites the high and the low--I am henceforward the spouse of the
grave."

The King was about to answer with much anger, when a Carmelite monk
entered the apartment hastily, his head and person muffled in the
long mantle and hood of striped cloth of the coarsest texture which
distinguished his order, and, flinging himself on his knees before the
King, conjur