er son, we see no more of that brave and
tender mother. She drops into oblivion. Her work was done. Those who
have thought again of her at all have accepted without question the only
extant answer--the poor response of a contemporary romance, according to
which she dwelt in peace, and closed an honoured and cherished life in a
castle in the duchy of her loving and grateful son.

It has been reserved for the present day to find the true reply--to draw
back the veil from the "bitter close of all," and to show that the
hardest part of her work began when she laid down her sword, and the
ending years of her life were the saddest and weariest portion. Never
since the days of Lear has such a tale been told of a parent's sacrifice
and of a child's ingratitude. In the royal home of the Duke of
Bretagne, there was no room for her but for whose love and care he would
have been a homeless fugitive. The discarded mother was imprisoned in a
foreign land, and left to die.

Let us hope that as it is supposed in the story, the lonely, broken
heart turned to a truer love than that of her cherished and cruel son--
even to His who says "My mother" of all aged women who seek to do the
will of God, and who will never forsake them that trust in Him.

CHAPTER ONE.

AT THE PATTY-MAKER'S SHOP.

"Man wishes to be loved--expects to be so:
And yet how few live so as to be loved!"

Rev Horatius Bonar, D.D.

It was a warm afternoon in the beginning of July--warm everywhere; and
particularly so in the house of Master Robert Altham, the patty-maker,
who lived at the corner of Saint Martin's Lane, where it runs down into
the Strand. Shall we look along the Strand? for the time is 1372, five
hundred years ago, and the Strand was then a very different place from
the street as we know it now.

In the first place, Trafalgar Square had no being. Below where it was
to be in the far future, stood Charing Cross--the real Eleanor Cross of
Charing, a fine Gothic structure--and four streets converged upon it.
That to the north-west parted almost directly into the Hay Market and
Hedge Lane, genuine country roads, in which both the hay and the hedge
had a real existence. Southwards ran King Street down to Westminster;
and northwards stood the large building of the King's Mews, where his
Majesty's hawks were kept. Two hundred years later, bluff King Hal
would turn out the hawks to make room for his horses; but as yet the
word mews had