aux were not held always to bind Henry of
Bolingbroke. But when the Earl of Cambridge returned to Elsinore, he
was rewarded for his labours, not with money nor lands, but by a grant
of the only thing for which he cared--the gift of Anne Mortimer. He was
penniless, and so was she. But though poverty was an habitual resident
within the doors, love did not fly out at the window.

The year 1408 brought another sanguinary struggle in favour of March's
title, headed by the old white-haired sinner Northumberland, who fell in
his attempt, at the battle of Bramham Moor, on the 29th of February. He
had armed in the cause of Rome, which he hoped to induce March to
espouse yet more warmly than Henry the Fourth. He probably did not know
the boy personally, and imagined him the counterpart of his gallant,
fervent father. He was as far from it as possible. Nothing on earth
would have induced March to espouse any cause warmly. He valued far too
highly his own dearly beloved ease.

Matters dragged themselves along that autumn as lazily as even March
could have wished. All over England the rain came down, sometimes in a
dashing shower, but generally in an idle dreary dripping from eaves and
ramparts. Nothing particular was happening to any body. At Cardiff all
was extremely quiet. Constance had recovered as much brightness as she
would ever recover, but never any more would she be the Constance of old
time.

"Surely our Lady's troubles be over now!" said Maude sanguinely.

On the evening on which that remark was made,--the fifteenth of
September--two sisters of Saint Clare sat watching, in a small French
convent, by the dying bed of a knight. At the siege of Briac Castle,
five days earlier, he had been mortally wounded in the head by a bolt
from a crossbow; and his squires bore him into the little convent to die
in peace. The sufferer had never fully recovered his consciousness. He
seemed but dimly aware of any thing--not fully sensible even to pain.
His words were few, incoherent, scarcely intelligible. What the nuns
could occasionally disentangle from his low mutterings was something
about "blue eyes," and "watching from the lattice." The last rites of
the Church were administered, but there could be no confession; a
crucifix was held before his eyes, but they doubted if he recognised
what it was. And about sunset of that autumn evening he died.

So closed the few and evil days of the vain, weak, self-loving Kent.