wished that I were dead
beside my mother. One comfort reached me indeed, a message from Lily
sent by a servant girl whom she trusted, giving me her dear love and
bidding me to be of good cheer.

At length came the day of burial, and my mother, wrapped in fair white
robes, was laid to her rest in the chancel of the church at Ditchingham,
where my father has long been set beside her, hard by the brass effigies
that mark the burying place of Lily's forefather, his wife, and many
of their children. This funeral was the saddest of sights, for the
bitterness of my father's grief broke from him in sobs and my sister
Mary swooned away in my arms. Indeed there were few dry eyes in all that
church, for my mother, notwithstanding her foreign birth, was much loved
because of her gentle ways and the goodness of her heart. But it came to
an end, and the noble Spanish lady and English wife was left to her long
sleep in the ancient church, where she shall rest on when her tragic
story and her very name are forgotten among men. Indeed this is likely
to be soon, for I am the last of the Wingfields alive in these parts,
though my sister Mary has left descendants of another name to whom my
lands and fortune go except for certain gifts to the poor of Bungay and
of Ditchingham.

When it was over I went back home. My father was sitting in the front
room well nigh beside himself with grief, and by him was my brother.
Presently he began to assail me with bitter words because I had let the
murderer go when God gave him into my hand.

'You forget, father,' sneered Geoffrey, 'Thomas woos a maid, and it was
more to him to hold her in his arms than to keep his mother's murderer
safely. But by this it seems he has killed two birds with one stone, he
has suffered the Spanish devil to escape when he knew that our mother
feared the coming of a Spaniard, and he has made enmity between us and
Squire Bozard, our good neighbour, who strangely enough does not favour
his wooing.'

'It is so,' said my father. 'Thomas, your mother's blood is on your
hands.'

I listened and could bear this goading injustice no longer.

'It is false,' I said, 'I say it even to my father. The man had killed
my mother before I met him riding back to seek his ship at Yarmouth
and having lost his way; how then is her blood upon my hands? As for my
wooing of Lily Bozard, that is my matter, brother, and not yours, though
perhaps you wish that it was yours and not mine. Why, fat