of her young prince, bound and friendless, stood before the throne of
that warrior-king. In the waving glitter of the countless swords raised
on high, she saw the murderous blade against the boy-heir of Lancaster
descend--descend! Her passion, her terror, at the spectre which fancy
thus evoked, seized and overcame her; and ere the last hurrah sent its
hollow echo to the raftered roof, she sank from her chair to the ground,
hueless and insensible as the dead.

The king had not without design permitted the unwonted presence of the
women in this warlike audience,--partly because he was not unaware
of the ambitious spirit of Isabel, partly because he counted on the
affection shown to his boyhood by the countess, who was said to have
singular influence over her lord, but principally because in such a
presence he trusted to avoid all discussion and all questioning, and
to leave the effect of his eloquence, in which he excelled all his
contemporaries, Gloucester alone excepted, single and unimpaired; and
therefore, as he rose, and returned with a majestic bend the acclamation
of the warriors, his eye now turned towards the chairs where the ladies
sat, and he was the first to perceive the swoon of the fair Anne.

With the tender grace that always characterized his service to women, he
descended promptly from his throne, and raised the lifeless form in his
stalwart arms; and Anne, as he bent over her, looked so strangely lovely
in her marble stillness, that even in that hour a sudden thrill shot
through a heart always susceptible to beauty as the harp-string to the
breeze.

"It is but the heat, lady," said he, to the alarmed countess, "and let
me hope that interest which my fair kinswoman may take in the fortunes
of Warwick and of York, hitherto linked together--"

"May they ever be so!" said Warwick, who, on seeing his daughter's
state, had advanced hastily to the dais; and, moved by the king's words,
his late speech, the evils that surrounded his throne, the gentleness
shown to the beloved Anne, forgetting resentment and ceremony alike, he
held out his mailed hand. The king, as he resigned Anne to her mother's
arms, grasped with soldierly frankness, and with the ready wit of the
cold intellect which reigned beneath the warm manner, the hand thus
extended, and holding still that iron gauntlet in his own ungloved and
jewelled fingers, he advanced to the verge of the dais, to which, in
the confusion occasioned by Anne's swoon,