end it.

This letter to the Patriarch of Christendom was his last hope.
Entreaties, remonstrances, patient tenderness, loving kindness, all had
proved vain. Now:--

"He had set his life upon a cast,
And he must run the hazard of the die."

Weary and miserable weeks they were, during which Earl Edmund waited the
Pope's answer. It came at last. The Pope replied as only a Romish
priest could be expected to reply. For the human anguish of the one he
had no sympathy; for the quasi-religious sorrows of the other he had
very much. He decreed, in the name of God, a full divorce between
Edmund Earl of Cornwall, and Margaret his wife, coldly admonishing the
Earl to take the Lord's chastening in good part, and to let the griefs
of earth lift his soul towards Heaven.

But it was not there that this sorrow lifted it at first. The human
agony had to be lived through before the Divine calm and peace could
come to heal it. His last effort had been made in vain. The passionate
hope of twenty years, that the day would come when his long, patient
love should meet with its reward even on earth, was shattered to the
dust. Even if she wished to come back after this, she could never
retrace her steps. Compensation he might find in Heaven, but there
could be none left for him on earth now. Even hope was dead within him.

The fatal Bull fell from the Earl's hand, and dropped a dead weight on
the rushes at his feet. He was a heart-wrecked man, and life had to go
on.

Was this man--for his is no fancy picture--a poor weak creature, or was
he a strong, heroic soul? Many will write him down the weakling;
perhaps all but those who have themselves known much of that hope
deferred which maketh the heart sick, and drains away the moral
life-blood drop by drop. It may be that the registers of Heaven held
appended to his name a different epithet. It is harder to wait than to
work; hardest of all to awake after long suspense to the blank
conviction that all has been in vain, and then to take up the cross and
meekly follow the Crucified.

Two hours later, a page brought a message to Reginald de Echingham to
the effect that he was wanted by his master.

Reginald, in his own eyes, was a thoroughly miserable man. He had
nobody to talk with, and nothing to do. He missed Olympias sadly, for
as the Earl had once jestingly remarked, she burnt perpetual incense on
his altar, and flattery was a necessary of life to Reginald. Olympia