high interests to which Edward invited him;
but he was so distracted and absent that he made but a sorry counsellor,
and the king, taking pity on him, dismissed his chamberlain for the
night.

Sleep came not to the couch of Hastings; his acuteness perceived
that whatever Edward's superstition, and he was a devout believer in
witchcraft, some more worldly motive actuated him in his resentment
to poor Sibyll. But as we need scarcely say that neither from the
abstracted Warner nor his innocent daughter had Hastings learned the
true cause, he wearied himself with vain conjectures, and knew not that
Edward involuntarily did homage to the superior chivalry of his gallant
favourite, when he dreaded that, above all men, Hastings should be made
aware of the guilty secret which the philosopher and his child could
tell. If Hastings gave his name and rank to Sibyll, how powerful a
weight would the tale of a witness now so obscure suddenly acquire!

Turning from the image of Sibyll, thus beset with thoughts of danger,
embarrassment, humiliation, disgrace, ruin, Lord Hastings recalled the
words of Gloucester; and the stately image of Katherine, surrounded with
every memory of early passion, every attribute of present ambition, rose
before him; and he slept at last, to dream not of Sibyll and the humble
orchard, but of Katherine in her maiden bloom, of the trysting-tree by
the halls of Middleham, of the broken ring, of the rapture and the woe
of his youth's first high-placed love.

CHAPTER IV. THE STRIFE WHICH SIBYLL HAD COURTED, BETWEEN KATHERINE AND
HERSELF, COMMENCES IN SERIOUS EARNEST.

Hastings felt relieved when, the next day, several couriers arrived with
tidings so important as to merge all considerations into those of state.
A secret messenger from the French court threw Gloucester into one of
those convulsive passions of rage, to which, with all his intellect and
dissimulation, he was sometimes subject, by the news of Anne's betrothal
to Prince Edward; nor did the letter from Clarence to the king,
attesting the success of one of his schemes, comfort Richard for the
failure of the other. A letter from Burgundy confirmed the report of the
spy, announced Duke Charles's intention of sending a fleet to prevent
Warwick's invasion, and rated King Edward sharply for his supineness in
not preparing suitably against so formidable a foe. The gay and reckless
presumption of Edward, worthier of a knight-errant than a monarch,