The manner in which King Henry provided the purchase-money required by the Duke of Milan for Lucia is amusing for its ingenuity. The sum agreed upon was seventy thousand florins; and the King paid it out of the pockets of five of his nobles. One was his own son, Thomas Duke of Clarence; the second and third were husbands of two of Kent's sisters-- Sir John Neville and Thomas Earl of Salisbury--the latter being the son of the murdered Lollard; the fourth was Lord Scrope, whose character appears to have been simple to an extreme; and the last was assuredly never asked to consent to the exaction, for he was the hapless March, still close prisoner in Windsor Castle. In the summer, Constance received a grant of all her late husband's lands. The Court was very gay that summer with royal weddings. The first bride was Constance's young stepmother, the Duchess Joan of York, who bestowed her hand on Lord Willoughby de Eresby: the second was the King's younger daughter, the Princess Philippa, who was consigned to the ungentle keeping of the far-off King of Denmark. Richard of Conisborough was selected to attend the Princess to Elsinore; but he was so poor that the King was obliged to make all the provision he required for the journey. It was not his own fault that his purse was light: his godfather, King Richard, had left him a sufficient competence; but the grants of Richard of Bordeaux were not held always to bind Henry of Bolingbroke. But when the Earl of Cambridge returned to Elsinore, he was rewarded for his labours, not with money nor lands, but by a grant of the only thing for which he cared--the gift of Anne Mortimer. He was penniless, and so was she. But though poverty was an habitual resident within the doors, love did not fly out at the window. The year 1408 brought another sanguinary struggle in favour of March's title, headed by the old white-haired sinner Northumberland, who fell in his attempt, at the battle of Bramham Moor, on the 29th of February. He had armed in the cause of Rome, which he hoped to induce March to espouse yet more warmly than Henry the Fourth. He probably did not know the boy personally, and imagined him the counterpart of his gallant, fervent father. He was as far from it as possible. Nothing on earth would have induced March to espouse any cause warmly. He valued far too highly his own dearly beloved ease. Matters dragged themselves along that autumn as lazily as even March could have wished. All over England the rain came down, sometimes in a dashing shower, but generally in an idle dreary dripping from eaves and ramparts. Nothing particular was happening to any body. At Cardiff all was extremely quiet. Constance had recovered as much brightness as she would ever recover, but never any more would she be the Constance of old time. "Surely our Lady's troubles be over now!" said Maude sanguinely.