On the evening on which that remark was made,--the fifteenth of September--two sisters of Saint Clare sat watching, in a small French convent, by the dying bed of a knight. At the siege of Briac Castle, five days earlier, he had been mortally wounded in the head by a bolt from a crossbow; and his squires bore him into the little convent to die in peace. The sufferer had never fully recovered his consciousness. He seemed but dimly aware of any thing--not fully sensible even to pain. His words were few, incoherent, scarcely intelligible. What the nuns could occasionally disentangle from his low mutterings was something about "blue eyes," and "watching from the lattice." The last rites of the Church were administered, but there could be no confession; a crucifix was held before his eyes, but they doubted if he recognised what it was. And about sunset of that autumn evening he died. So closed the few and evil days of the vain, weak, self-loving Kent. His age was only twenty-six; he left no child but the disinherited Alianora, and his sisters took good care that she should remain disinherited. They pounced upon the lands of the dead brother with an eagerness which would have been rather more decent had it been a little less apparent; and to the widowed Lucia, who was the least guilty party to the conspiracy for which she had been made the decoy, they left little beyond her wardrobe. She was actually reduced to appeal to the King's mercy for means to live. Henry responded to her piteous petition by the offer of his brother of Dorset as a second husband. Lucia was one of those women who are born actresses, and whose nature it is to do things which seem forced and unnatural to others. She flattered the King with anticipations that she was on the point of complying with his wishes, till the last moment; and then she eloped with Sir Henry de Mortimer, possibly a distant connection of the Earl of March. It may be added, since Lucia now disappears from the story, that she survived her second marriage for fourteen years, and showed herself at her death a most devout member of the orthodox Church, by a will which was from beginning to end a string of bequests for masses, to be sung for the repose of her soul, and of the soul of Kent. Bertram and Maude, to whom the news came first, scarcely knew how to tell Constance of Kent's death. At last Maude thought of dressing the little Alianora in daughter's mourning, and sending her into her mother's room alone. The gradations of mourning were at that time so distinct and minute that Constance's practised eye would read the parable in an instant. So they broke in that manner the news they dared not tell her.