t been
thy pleasure to give me that cup of gall they mixed that day for her,
and to her the draught of pure fresh water thou hast held to me!
Perchance I could have drunk it with less pain than she did; and at
least it would have saved the pain to her.

"That was in the fourteenth year of Edward of Caernarvon. [1320.] So
long as Earl Edmund of Arundel lived, there was little to fear. He, as
I said, loved my father, and was a father to Isabel. The Lady of
Arundel likewise was then living, and was careful over her as a mother.
Knowest thou that the Lady Griselda, of such fame for her patient
endurance, was an ancestress of thy father? It should have been of thy
mother. Hers was a like story; only that to her came no reward, no
happy close.

"But ere I proceed, I must speak of one woeful matter, which I do
believe to have been the ruin of my father. He was never loved by the
people--partly, I think, because he gave counsel to the King to rule, as
they thought, with too stern a hand; partly because my grandfather loved
money too well, nor was he over careful how he came thereby; partly
because the Queen hated him, and she was popular; but far above all
these for another reason, which was the occasion of his fall, and the
ruin of all who loved him.

"Hast thou ever heard of the Boni-Homines? They have other names--
Albigenses, Waldenses, Cathari, Men of the Valleys. They are a sect of
heretics, dwelling originally in the dominions of the Marquis of
Monferrato, toward the borders betwixt France, Italy, and Spain: men
condemned by the Church, and holding certain evil opinions touching the
holy doctrine of grace of condignity, and free-will, and the like. Yet
some of them, I must confess, lead not unholy lives."

Philippa merely answered that she had heard of these heretics.

"Well," resumed the blind woman, "my father became entangled with these
men. How or wherefore I know not. He might have known that their
doctrines had been condemned by the holy Council of Lumbars two hundred
years back. But when the Friars Predicants were first set up by the
blessed Dominic, under leave of our holy Father the Pope, many of these
sectaries crept in among them. A company went forth from Ashridge, and
another from Edingdon--the two houses of this brood of serpents. And
one of them, named Giles de Edingdon, fell in with my father, and taught
him the evil doctrines of these wretches, whom Earl Edmund of Cornwall
(of the blo