"Wellnigh hacked his body in pieces," cried Jack, with quivering lips. "Roger Mortimer claims one hand to send to his wife as a trophy. Another they vow shall be sent to the Countess of Leicester at Dover--his own wife, Leofric, his own loving wife! I trow if the Prior had not come forth from the gates, with his monks after him, and carried away the headless trunk, that it would have been truly hacked to pieces by the savages who surrounded it. They are even now carrying it devoutly into the chapel, to lay it beneath the altar. But the head, the hands, the feet--they cannot prevail to save those. Our great and noble Earl--to think that it should come to this with him!" Jack turned away to hide the tears which bodily exhaustion and mental distress forced from his eyes. Leofric, with a shocked face, returned to the side of Amalric, where the monk still retained a place, although the rites were all concluded. Amalric's eyes flashed open once more. "My father?" he asked. "Thou wilt see him soon; he has gone before thee," answered Leofric gently; and Amalric understood at once. He closed his eyes with a faint smile. To him the strife of arms, the clash of wills, the storm and stress of life, meant nothing. He was drifting out upon an ocean where such things had neither part nor lot. Perhaps in that hour it soothed his spirit to know that his father had passed thither before him. The things of time had no concern for one who was launching forth upon the tide of eternity. "Is he dead too?" asked Jack, with a break in his voice. "It is better sometimes to die than to live," answered Leofric softly in his ear. Then both knelt down by the side of their comrade, and the monk commended the departing soul into the hands of God. When they arose, Amalric lay still with a smile upon his lips, and the monk, folding the hands upon the mailed breast, said reverently, "_Requiescat in pace_." Jack's sobs could not be controlled; Leofric's tears were on his cheek, but he commanded himself, and whispered a word in the ear first of the monk and then of his companion. Together they lifted the inanimate form and reverently carried it to the chapel, where before the altar, beneath a velvet pall, lay the mutilated body of Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester. They laid Amalric down beside his father, and Leofric spread over him the silken banner which had been worked by the fingers of Alys and Linda. It mattered not in the eyes of the monks that De Montfort and his sons lay under the ban of papal excommunication. England had never altogether submitted to the tyranny of the Pope, and at a moment like this nothing was remembered by those pious men save that the Earl had fought a good fight, had been their friend and the friend of the people, and had died a hero's death upon the field of battle.