repugnant alike to his feelings and to his policy. As soon as Henry himself was gone, the Clito would have positively no competitor; for of all Henry’s surviving children, the only one who had any legal rights was a daughter. The future of Henry’s policy had hung upon the thread of a single life, and now the silver cord was loosed. The Ætheling’s child-widow was in England: on that sad night she had crossed with her father-in-law instead of her husband, and thus escaped sharing the latter’s fate. Fulk at once sent to demand his daughter back;[592] but Henry was unwilling to part from her, and kept her constantly with him as if she were his own child, till the little girl herself begged to see her own parents again, and was allowed to return to Angers.[593] Henry seems really to have clung to her as a sort of legacy from his dead son; but, to Fulk’s great indignation, he kept her dowry as well as herself.[594] An embassy sent to England at Christmas 1122--apparently after her return to Anjou--came back without success after a delay of several months and a stormy parting from the king.[595] The most important part of the dowry however was still in Fulk’s own hands. His settlement of Maine upon William and Matilda and their possible posterity was annulled by William’s death; Fulk was once more free to dispose of the county as he would. Regarding all ties with Henry as broken, and urged at once by Almeric of Montfort and Louis of France, he offered it, with the hand of his second daughter Sibyl, to William the Clito.[596] [592] Eng. Chron. a. 1121. [593] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), p. 875. [594] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. v. c. 419 (Hardy, p. 655). [595] Eng. Chron. a. 1123. [596] Ord. Vit. (as above), pp. 838, 876. Eng. Chron. a. 1124. Will. Malm. as above (p. 654).