ath
of life and win the hero's crown, not by deeds of glory and renown, but
by that higher and holier path of suffering and renunciation which One
chose that we might know He had been there before us. Thou mayest live
to be one of this world's heroes, boy; but in the world to come it will
be thy brother who will wear the victor's crown."

"I truly believe it," answered Gaston, drawing a deep breath; "but yet
we cannot spare him from this world. I give him into thy hands, my
Father, that thou mayest save him for us here."

CHAPTER XXVII. PETER SANGHURST'S WOOING.

"Joan -- sweetest mistress -- at last I find you; at last my eyes behold
again those peerless charms for which they have pined and hungered so
long! Tell me, have you no sweet word of welcome for him whose heart you
hold between those fair hands, to do with it what you will?"

Joan, roused from her reverie by those smoothly-spoken words, uttered in
a harsh and grating voice, turned quickly round to find herself face to
face with Peter Sanghurst -- the man she had fondly hoped had passed out
of her life for ever.

Joan and her father, after a considerable period spent in wanderings in
foreign lands (during which Sir Hugh had quite overcome the melancholy
and sense of panic into which he had been thrown by the scourge of the
Black Death and his wife's sudden demise as one of its victims), had at
length returned to Woodcrych. The remembrance of the plague was fast
dying out from men's minds. The land was again under cultivation; and
although labour was still scarce and dear, and continued to be so for
many, many years, whilst the attempts at legislation on this point only
produced riot and confusion (culminating in the next reign in the
notable rebellion of Wat Tyler, and leading eventually to the
emancipation of the English peasantry), things appeared to be returning
to their normal condition, and men began to resume their wonted apathy
of mind, and to cease to think of the scourge as the direct visitation
of God.

Sir Hugh had been one of those most alarmed by the ravages of the
plague. He was full of the blind superstition of a thoroughly
irreligious man, and he knew well that he had been dabbling in forbidden
arts, and had been doing things that were supposed in those days to make
a man peculiarly the prey of the devil after death. Thus when the Black
Death had visited the country, and he had heard on all sides that it was
the visitation of Go