For the whole day there was no sign from Constance that she had even noticed the hint. Her voice and manner showed no change. But at night, when the little child of three years old knelt at her mother's knee for her evening prayer, said Lollard-wise in simple English, they found it had not escaped her. As the child came to the usual "God bless my father and mother,"--which, fatherless as she had always been, she had been taught to say,--Constance quietly checked her, and made her say, "God bless my mother" only. And at the close, little Alianora was instructed to add,--"God pardon my father's soul." Knowing how passionately Constance had once loved Kent, this calm show of indifference puzzled Maude Lyngern sorely. But to the Dowager Lady it was no such riddle. "Her love is dead, child," she said, when Maude timidly expressed her surprise. "And when that is verily thus, it were lighter to bid a dead corpse live than a dead love." All this time the Lollard persecution slowly waxed hotter and hotter. Men began to thank God when any "heretics" among their friends were permitted to die in their beds, and to whisper in hushed accents that when the Prince of Wales should be King, whose nature was more merciful than his father's, matters might perchance mend. They little knew what the future was to bring. The worst was not yet over,--was not even to come during the reign of Henry of Bolingbroke. Seeing that Constance was now restored to her lands, and basking in the sunshine of Court favour, it struck Lady Abergavenny, a niece of Archbishop Arundel, who was a politic woman--as most of his nieces were--that an alliance between her son and Isabel Le Despenser would be a good speculation. And her Ladyship, being moreover a strong-minded woman, whose husband was of very little public and less private consequence, carried her point, and the marriage of Isabel with young Richard Beauchamp took place at Cardiff on the eleventh birthday of the bride. The ceremony was slightly hastened at the wish of the Dowager Lady Le Despenser. She was anxious not to distress Constance by breaking the news too suddenly to her, but she felt within herself that the golden bowl was nearing its breaking at the fountain, and that the silver cords of her earthly house of this tabernacle were not far from being taken down. She was an old woman,--very old, for a period wherein few lived to old age; she had long outlived her husband, and had seen the funerals of nearly all her children. The greater part even of her earthly treasures were already safe where moth and rust corrupt not, and her own feeling of earnest longing to rejoin them grew daily stronger. It was for the daughter's sake alone that she cared to live now; the daughter to whom men had left only God and that mother. A new lesson was now to be taught to Constance--to rest wholly upon God.