as if the only words that would come to his lips in
reply were two lines of an inscription set up in many a church, and as
familiar to all present as any hackneyed proverb to us.

"`_Pur ta pite, Jesu, regarde, Et met cest alme en sauve garde_.'"

There was an instant's dead silence. It was broken by the mother's cry
of anguish--

"Tom, Tom! My lad, my last lad!"

"Drowned, Master Lyngern?" asked a score of voices.

Bertram tacitly ignored the question. He walked languidly up the hall,
and dropping on one knee before the Princess, presented to her a
sapphire signet-ring--the last token sent by her dead husband.
Constance took it mechanically; and Bertram, going back to his usual
seat, filled a goblet with Gascon wine, and drank it like a man who was
faint and exhausted.

"Sit, Master Lyngern, and rest you," pursued the Dowager; "but when you
be refreshed, give us to wit the rest."

The tone of her voice seemed to say that the worst which could come, had
come; and the dreadful fact known, the details mattered little.

Bertram attempted to eat, but almost immediately he pushed away his
trencher, and regardless of etiquette, laid his forehead upon his arm on
the table.

"I cannot eat! And how shall I speak what I must say? I would have
died for him." Then, suddenly lifting his head, he spoke quickly, as if
he wished to come at once to the end of his miserable task. "Noble
ladies, my Lord of Salisbury is beheaden of the rabble at Cirencester,
and my Lord of Exeter at Pleshy; and men say that Lord Richard the King
lieth dead at Pomfret, and that God wot how."

Constance spoke at last, but in a voice not like her own.

"God doom Henry of Bolingbroke!"

The words, if repeated, might have doomed her; but she feared no man.

That evening, Bertram told the details of that woeful story.

The barge-master whom they had accosted was sailing westwards, and he
readily agreed to take Le Despenser and his suite over to Ireland.
Somewhat too readily, Bertram thought; and he feared treachery from the
first. When the boat had pulled off to some distance, the barge-master
asked to what port his passengers wished to go. He was told that any
Irish port on the eastern coast would suit them; and he then altered his
tone, and roughly refused to carry them anywhere but to Bristol. The
man's evil intentions were manifest now; and Le Despenser, drawing his
sword, sternly commanded him to continue his voyage to Ireland, if