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THE WELL IN THE DESERT, AN OLD LEGEND OF THE HOUSE OF ARUNDEL, BY EMILY
SARAH HOLT.

PREFACE.

It is said that only travellers in the arid lands of the East really
know the value of water. To them the Well in the Desert is a treasure
and a blessing: unspeakably so, when the water is pure and sweet; yet
even though it be salt and brackish, it may still save life.

Was it less so, in a figurative sense, to the travellers through that
great desert of the Middle Ages, wherein the wells were so few and far
between? True, the water was brackish; man had denied the streams, and
filled up the wells with stones; yet for all this it was God-given, and
to those who came, and dug for the old spring, and drank, it was the
water of eternal life. The cry was still sounding down the ages.

"If any man thirst, let him come unto Me, and drink." And no less
blessed are the souls that come now: but for us, the wells are so
numerous and so pure, that we too often pass them by, and go on our way
thirsting. Strange blindness!--yet not strange: for until the Angel of
the Lord shall open the eyes of Hagar, she must needs go mourning
through the wilderness, not seeing the well.

"Lord, that we may receive our sight!"--and may come unto Thee, and
drink, and thirst no more.

CHAPTER ONE.

MY LADY'S BOWER IS SWEPT.

"I am too low for scorn to lower me,
And all too sorrow-stricken to feel grief."

Edwin Arnold.

Soft and balmy was the air, and the sunlight radiant, at an early hour
of a beautiful June morning; and fair was the landscape that met the
eyes of the persons who were gathered a few feet from the portcullis of
a grand stately old castle, crowning a wooded height near the Sussex
coast. There were two persons seated on horseback: the one a youth of
some twenty years, in a page's dress; the other a woman, who sat behind
him on the pillion. Standing about were two men and a woman, the last
holding a child in her arms. The woman on the pillion was closely
veiled, and much muffled in her wrappings, considering the season of the
year and the warmth of the weather; nor did she lift her veil when she
spoke.

"The child, Alina," she said, in a tone so soft and low that the words
seemed rather breathed than spoken.

The woman who stood beside the horse answered the appeal by placing the
child in the arms of the speaker. It was a pretty, engaging little girl
of thre