'I shall have my boy back again,' she said. 'Yes; he will come back to me. And what will he say to me when I tell him all? Yet I _must_ have him back. Oh! to think of the hangman tying the rope about his neck'--she shuddered and trembled--'and afterwards the cruel knife'--she clasped her hands and could not say the words--'I see the comely limbs of my boy. Oh! the thought tears my heart--it tears me through and through. I cannot think of anything else day or night. And yet in the prison he is so patient and so cheerful. I marvel that men can be so patient with this dreadful death before them.' She broke out again into another passion of sobbing and crying. Then she became calmer, and tried to speak of things less dreadful. 'When first I visited my boy in prison,' she said, 'Humphrey came humbly to ask my pardon. Poor lad! I have had hard thoughts of him. It is certain that he was in the plot from the beginning. Yet had he not gone so far, should we have sat down when the rising began? But he doth still accuse himself of rashness and calls himself the cause of all our misfortunes. He fell upon his knees, in the sight of all, to ask forgiveness, saying that it was he and none other who had brought ruin upon us all. Then Robin begged me to raise him up and comfort him, which I did, putting aside my hard thoughts and telling him that, being such stubborn Protestants, our lads could not choose but join the Duke, whether he advised it or whether he did not. Nay, I told him that Robin would have dragged him willy nilly. And so I kissed him, and Robin took him by the hand and solemnly assured him that his grandfather had no such thought in his mind.' 'Nay,' I said, 'my father and Barnaby would certainly have joined the Duke, Humphrey or not. Never were any men more eager for rebellion.' 'I have been to London,' she went on. ''Tis a long journey and I effected nothing; for the mind of the King, I was assured, is harder than the nether millstone. My brother-in-law, Philip Boscorel, went with me, and I left him there. But I have no hope that he will be able to help us, his old friends being much scattered and many of them dead, and some hostile to the Court and in ill-favour. So I returned, seeing that, if I could not save my son I could be with him until he died. The day before yesterday he was tried--if you call that a trial when hundreds together plead guilty and are all alike sentenced to death.' 'Have you seen him since the trial?'