on England! Was the crown that she
carried with her worth the price which she cost that carried it? Well,
she is dead now--gone before God to answer all that long and black
account of hers. Methinks it took some answering. Child, my father did
some ill things, and my grandfather did more; but did either ever
anything to merit the shame and agony of those two gibbets at Hereford
and Bristol? Gibbets for them, that had sat in the King's council, and
aided him to rule the realm,--and one of them a white-haired man over
sixty years! [See Note 5.] And what had they done save to anger the
tigress? God help us all! We be all poor sinners; but there be some,
at the least in men's eyes, a deal blacker than others. But thou
wouldst know her story, not theirs: yet theirs is the half of hers, and
the tale were unfinished if I told it not."

"What was she like?" asked Philippa.

Mother Joan passed her hand slowly over the features of her niece.

"Like, and not like," she said. "Thy features are sharper cut than
hers; and though in thy voice there is a sound of hers, it is less soft
and low. Hers was like the wind among the strings of an harp hanging on
the wall. Thy colouring I cannot see. But if thou be like her, thine
hair is glossy, and of chestnut hue; and thine eyes are dark and
mournful."

"Tell me about her, Aunt, I pray you," said Philippa.

Joan La Despenser smoothed down her monastic habit, and leaned her head
back against the wall. There was evidently some picture of memory's
bringing before her sightless eyes, and her voice itself had a lower and
softer tone as she spoke of the dead sister. But her first words were
not of her.

"Holy Virgin!" she said, "when thou didst create the world, wherefore
didst thou make women? For women have but two fates: either they are
black-souled, like the tigress Isabelle, and then they prosper and
thrive, as she did; or else they are white snowdrops, like our dead
darling, and then they are martyrs. A few die in the cradle--those whom
thou lovest best; and what fools are we to weep for them! Ah me! things
be mostly crooked in this world. Is there another, me wondereth, where
they grow straight?--where the black-souled die on the gibbets, and the
white-souled wear the crowns? I would like to die, and change to that
Golden Land, if there be. Methinks it is far off."

It was a Land "very far off." And over the eyes of Joan La Despenser
the blinding film of earth