I
have helped their old ones and their young through death. Some I have
saved from the gallows. Some I have--" she stopped and hung her head as
if black memories overpowered her.

He knew what she had left unfinished.

"You have been--to comfort those who lie in Newgate--at their last
extremity?" he ended for her.

"Ay," she answered. "The one who will show kindness to them in those
awful hours they worship as God's self. There was a poor fellow I once
befriended there"--she spoke slowly and her voice shook. "He was
condemned--for taking a man's life. The last night--before I left
him--he knelt to me and swore--he had meant not murder. He had struck
in rage--one who had tortured him with taunts till he went raving. He
struck, and the man fell--and _he_ had killed him! And now must hang."

"Good God!" cried my lord Duke. "By chance! In frenzy! Not knowing! And
he died for it?"

"Ay," she answered, her great eyes on his and wide with horror, "on
Tyburn Tree!"

_CHAPTER XXXI_

_Their Graces Keep their Wedding Day at Camylott_

"She came to Court at last, my Lord Duke," said his Grace of
Marlborough. "She came at last--as I felt sure 'twas Fate she should."

'Twas at Camylott he said this, where he had come in those days which
darkened about him when, royal favour lost, the acclamations of a
fickle public stilled, its clamour of applause almost forgot and denied
by itself, his glory as statesman, commander, warrior seemed to sink
beneath the horizon like a sunset in a winter sky. His splendid frame
shattered by the stroke of illness, his heart bereaved, his great mind
dulled and saddened, there were few friends faithful to him, but my
Lord Duke of Osmonde, who had never sought his favour or required his
protection, who had often held views differing from his own and hidden
none of them, was among the few in whose company he found solace and
pleasure.

"I see you as I was," he would say. "Nay, rather as I might have been
had Nature given me a thing she gave to you and withheld from John
Churchill. You were the finer creature and less disturbed by poor
worldly dreams."

So more than once he came to be guest at Camylott, and would be moved
to pleasure by the happiness and fulness of life in the very air of the
place, by the joyousness of the tall, handsome children, by the spirit
and sweet majesty of the tall beauty their mother, by the loveliness of
the country and the cheerful air of well-being among