And now began that woeful Dolorous Way, which our Lord King Edward trod after his Master Christ. But who knoweth whither a strange road shall lead him, until he be come to the end thereof? I wis well that many folk have said unto us--Jack and me--since all things were made plain, How is it ye saw not aforetime, and wherefore followed ye the Queen thus long? They saw not aforetime, no more than we; but now that all is open, up come they with wagging heads and snorkilling noses, and--"Verily, we were sore to blame for not seeing through the mist"-- the mist through the which, when it lay thick, no man saw. _Ha, chetife_! I could easily fall to prophesying, myself, when all is over. Could we have seen what lay at the end of that Dolorous Way, should any true and loyal man have gone one inch along it? And who was like to think, till he did see, what an adder the King nursed in his bosom? Most men counted her a fair white dove, all innocent and childlike: that did I not. I did see far enough, for all the mist, to see she was no child in that fashion; yet children love mischief well enough betimes; and I counted her, if not white, but grey--not the loathly black fiend that she was at the last seen to be. I saw many a thing I loved not, many a thing I would not have done in her place, many a thing that I but half conceived, and feared to be ill deed--but there ended my seeing. I thought she was caught within the meshes of a net, and I was sorry she kept not thereout. But I never guessed that the net was spread by her own hands. My mother, Dame Alice de Lethegreve, I think, saw clearer than I did: but it was by reason she loved more,--loved him who became the sacrifice, not the miserable sinner for whose hate and wickedness he was sacrificed. So soon as King Edward knew of the Queen's landing, which was by Michaelmas Eve at latest, he put forth a proclamation to all his lieges, wherein he bade them resist the foreign horde about to be poured upon England. Only three persons were to be received with welcome and honour: which was, the Queen herself, Edward her son (his father, in his just ire, named him not his son, neither as Earl of Chester), and the King's brother, the Lord Edmund of Kent. I always was sorry for my Lord of Kent; he was so full hoodwinked by the Queen, and never so much as guessed for one moment, that he acted a disloyal part. He was a noble gentleman, a kindly and a generous; not, maybe, the wisest man in the realm, and something too prone to rush after all that had the look of a noble deed, ere he gave himself time enough to consider the same. But if the world held no worser men at heart than he, it were marvellous better world than now.