“Why not? It is as well to face things. Look at all these monuments about us, and inscriptions, a lot of them to young people, though now it doesn’t matter if they were old or young. Gone, every one of them and quite forgotten, though some were great folk in their time. Gone utterly and for always, nothing left, except perhaps descendants in a labourer’s cottage here and there who never even heard of them.” “I don’t believe it,” he said almost passionately, “I believe that they are living for ever and ever, perhaps as you and I, perhaps elsewhere.” “I wish I could,” she answered, smiling, “for then my dream might have been true, and you might have been that knight whose brass is lost,” and she pointed to an empty matrix alongside that of the great Plantagenet lady. Godfrey glanced at the inscription which was left when the Cromwellians tore up the brass. “He was her husband,” he said, translating, “who died on the field of Crecy in 1346.” “Oh!” exclaimed Isobel, and was silent. Meanwhile Godfrey, quite undisturbed, was spelling out the inscription beneath the figure of the knight’s wife, and remarked presently: “She seems to have died a year before him. Yes, just after marriage, the monkish Latin says, and—what is it? Oh! I see, ‘_in sanguine_,’ that is, in blood, whatever that may mean. Perhaps she was murdered. I say, Isobel, I wish you would copy someone else’s dress for your party.” “Nonsense,” she answered. “I think it’s awfully interesting. I wonder what happened to her.” “I don’t know. I can’t remember anything in the old history, and it would be almost impossible to find out. There are no coats of arms, and what is more, no surname is given in either inscription. The one says, ‘Pray for the soul of Edmundus, Knight, husband of Phillippa,’ and the other, ‘Pray for the soul of Phillippa, Dame, wife of Edmundus.’ It looks as though the surnames had been left out on purpose, perhaps because of some queer story about the pair which their relations wished to be forgotten.” “Then why do they say that one died in blood and the other on the field of Crecy?” Godfrey shook his head because he did not know. Nor indeed was he ever able to find out. That secret was lost hundreds of years ago. Then the conversation died away and they got to their work. At length the rubbing, as it is termed technically, was finished and the two prepared to depart out of the gloom of the great church which had gathered about them as the evening closed in. Solitary and small they looked in it surrounded by all those mementoes of the dead, enveloped as it were in the very atmosphere of death. Who has not felt that atmosphere standing alone at nightfall in one of our ancient English churches that embody in baptism, marriage and burial the hopes, the desires, and the fears of unnumbered generations?