So above a month passed away. Master John de Melbourne was sent down from the King as supervisor of the lands and goods of my Lady and her children; but he came with the men-at-arms, so he brought no fresh news: and it was after Christmas before we knew the rest. Then, one winter morrow, came a warrant of the Chancery, granting to my Lady all the lands of her own inheritance, by reason of the execution of her husband. And then she knew that all had come that would come. We children, Meg except, had not yet been allowed to see our mother, who had never stirred from her bedchamber. One evening, early in January, we were sitting in her closet, clad in our new doole raiment (how I hated it!), talking to one another in low voices, for I think we all had a sort of instinct that things were going wrong somehow, even the babies who understood least about it: when all at once, for none of us saw her enter, a lady stood before us. A lady whom we did not know, clad in white widow-doole, tall and stately, with a white, white face, so that her weeds were scarcely whiter, and a kind of fixed, unalterable expression of intense pain, yet unchangeable peace. It seemed to me such a strange look. Whether the pain or the peace were the greater I knew not, nor could I tell which was the newer. We girls sat and looked at her with puzzled faces. Then a faint smile broke through the pain, on the white face, like the sun breaking through clouds, and a voice we knew, asked of us-- "Don't you know me, my children?" And that was how our mother came back to us. She did not leave us again. Ever since he died, she has lived for us. That white face, full of peace and yet of pain, abides with her; her colour has never returned. But I think the pain grows less with years, and the peace grows more. She smiles freely, but it is faintly, as if smiles hardly belonged to her, and were only a borrowed thing that might not be kept; and her eyes never light up as of old--only that once, when some months after our father's end, Nym and Geoff came back to us. Then, just for one moment, her old face came again. For I think she had given them up,--not to King Edward, but to Christ our Lord, who is her King.