ect denoted the poverty
seldom their characteristic. Here he knocked; the door was opened by a
lay-brother; a sign and a smile were interchanged, and the visitor was
ushered into a room belonging to the superior, but given up for the last
few days to a foreign priest, to whom the whole community appeared to
consider the reverence of a saint was due. And yet this priest, who,
seated alone, by a casement which commanded a partial view of the
distant Tower of London, received the conspirator, was clad in the
humblest serge. His face was smooth and delicate; and the animation of
the aspect, the vehement impatience of the gesture, evinced little of
the holy calm that should belong to those who have relinquished the
affairs of earth for meditation on the things of heaven. To this
personage the sturdy Hilyard bowed his manly knees; and casting himself
at the priest's feet, his eyes, his countenance, changed from their
customary hardihood and recklessness into an expression at once of
reverence and of pity.

"Well, man--well, friend--good friend, tried and leal friend, speak!
speak!" exclaimed the priest, in an accent that plainly revealed a
foreign birth.

"Oh, gracious lady! all hope is over; I come but to bid you fly. Adam
Warner was brought before the usurper; he escaped, indeed, the torture,
and was faithful to the trust. But the papers--the secret of the
rising--are in the hands of Hastings."

"How long, O Lord," said Margaret of Anjou, for she it was, under that
reverend disguise, "how long wilt Thou delay the hour of triumph and
revenge?"

The princess as she spoke had suffered her hood to fall back, and
her pale, commanding countenance, so well fitted to express fiery and
terrible emotion, wore that aspect in which many a sentenced man had
read his doom,--an aspect the more fearful, inasmuch as the passion that
pervaded it did not distort the features, but left them locked, rigid,
and marble-like in beauty, as the head of the Medusa.

"The day will dawn at last," said Hilyard; "but the judgments of Heaven
are slow. We are favoured, at the least, that our secret is confined
to a man more merciful than his tribe." He then related to Margaret
his interview with Hastings at the house of the Lady Lougueville, and
continued: "This morning, not an hour since, I sought him (for last
evening he did not leave Edward, a council met at the Tower), and
learned that he had detected the documents in the recesses of Warner's
en