he was
a slovenly, guzzling old crone, who drank caudle from morning till night,
and demanded good living as a support during the performance of her
trying duties; but these last she contrived to make wondrous light,
knowing that there was none to reprove her.

"A fine night I have had," she had grumbled when she brought back Sir
Jeoffry's answer to her lady's message. "My old bones are like to break,
and my back will not straighten itself. I will go to the kitchen to get
victuals and somewhat to warm me; your ladyship's own woman shall sit
with you."

Her ladyship's "own woman" was also the sole attendant of the two little
girls, Barbara and Anne, whose nursery was in another wing of the house,
and my lady knew full well she would not come if she were told, and that
there would be no message sent to her.

She knew, too, that the fire was going out, but, though she shivered
under the bed-clothes, she was too weak to call the woman back when she
saw her depart without putting fresh fuel upon it.

So she lay alone, poor lady, and there was no sound about her, and her
thin little mouth began to feebly quiver, and her great eyes, which
stared at the hangings, to fill with slow cold tears, for in sooth they
were not warm, but seemed to chill her poor cheeks as they rolled slowly
down them, leaving a wet streak behind them which she was too far gone in
weakness to attempt to lift her hand to wipe away.

"Nine times like this," she panted faintly, "and 'tis for naught but
oaths and hard words that blame me. I was but a child myself and he
loved me. When 'twas 'My Daphne,' and 'My beauteous little Daphne,' he
loved me in his own man's way. But now--" she faintly rolled her head
from side to side. "Women are poor things"--a chill salt tear sliding
past her lips so that she tasted its bitterness--"only to be kissed for
an hour, and then like this--only for this and nothing else. I would
that this one had been dead."

Her breath came slower and more pantingly, and her eyes stared more
widely.

"I was but a child," she whispered--"a child--as--as this will be--if she
lives fifteen years."

Despite her weakness, and it was great and woefully increasing with each
panting breath, she slowly laboured to turn herself towards the pillow on
which her offspring lay, and, this done, she lay staring at the child and
gasping, her thin chest rising and falling convulsively. Ah, how she
panted, and how she stared, the glaze of