He did not look like a messenger of rest. But all God's messengers are not angels. And there was little indeed of the angel in this man's composition. His figure would have been tall but for a deformity which his enemies called a hump back, and his friends merely an overgrown shoulder; and his face would have been handsome but for its morose, scowling expression, which by no means betokened an amiable character. The two cousins stood and looked at each other. The prisoner was the grandson of Henry of Bolingbroke, and the visitor was the grandson of Richard of Conisborough. There were a few words on each side--contemptuous taunts, and sharp accusations, on the one side,--low, patient replies on the other. Then came a gleam of something flashing in the dim light, and the dagger of the visitor was sheathed in the pale prisoner's heart. At rest, at last: safe, and saved, and with God. It was a cruel, brutal, cold-blooded murder. But was it nothing else? Was there in it no operation of those Divine wheels which "grind slowly, yet exceeding small?"--no visitation, by Him to whom vengeance belongeth, of the sins of the guilty fathers upon the guiltless son-- vengeance for the broken heart of Richard of Bordeaux, for the judicial murder of Richard of Conisborough, for the dreary imprisoned girlhood of Anne Mortimer, and--last, not least--for the long, slow years of moral torture, ending with the bitter cup forced into the dying hand of the White Rose of Langley? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Note 1. Richard of Conisborough married secondly, and probably chiefly with the view of securing a mother for his children, Maude Clifford, a daughter of the great Lollard House of Clifford of Cumberland. She survived him many years. Note 2. The Psalter is still extant, in the British Museum: Cott. Ms. Domit. A. xvii. CHAPTER FOURTEEN. HISTORICAL APPENDIX. The condensed biographical sketches which follow, of such persons as figure principally in the story, will help to show to those who wish to read it intelligently, how much of it is genuine history. They will see that the tale is mainly constructed on a succession of hypotheses, but that every hypothesis rests on a substratum of fact, however slender, and in many cases on careful weighing and comparison of a number of facts together. Some of these conjectures are perhaps the only ones which will fully and satisfactorily account for the sequence of events. For convenience of reference, the names are arranged in alphabetical order. ARUNDEL, THOMAS DE, ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY.